We propose a stylized model of a problem-solving organization whose internal communication structure is given by a fixed network. Problems arrive randomly anywhere in this network and must find their way to their respective "specialized solvers" by relying on local information alone. The...

We find that international trade has an economically significant and statistically robust positive effect on productivity. Our trade measure is imports plus exports relative to purchasing power parity GDP (real openness), which we argue is preferable on theoretical grounds to the nominal measure...

When two candidates of different quality compete in a one dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the...

I present a general theorem on preference aggregation. This theorem implies, as corollaries, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Wilson's extension of Arrow's to non-Paretian aggregation rules, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem and Sen's result on the Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal. The theorem...

Barberà and Coelho (2006) documented six screening rules associated with the rule of k names that are used by different institutions around the world. Here, we study whether these screening rules satisfy stability. A set is said to be a weak Condorcet set la Gehrlein (1985) if no candidate in...

A decision-maker exhibits preference for flexibility if he always prefers any set of alternatives to its subsets, even when two of them contain the same best element. Desire for flexibility can be explained as the consequence of the agent's uncertainty along a two-stage process, where he must...

We analyze conditions under which campaign rhetoric may affect the beliefs of the voters over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election. We develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological. We analyze an...