Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a...

A ranking method assigns to every weighted directed graph a (weak) orderingof the nodes. In this paper we axiomatize the ranking method that ranksthe nodes according to their outflow using four independent axioms. This outflowranking method generalizes the ranking by outdegree for directed...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior,these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

Power is a core concept in the analysis and design of organizations. One of the problems with the extant literature on positional power in hierarchies is that it is mainly restricted to the analysis of power in terms of the bare positions of the actors. While such an analysis informs us about...

A well-known model in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors who are able to affect the behavior of their followers. Hence, opinion leaders have some power over their followers, and they can exercise this power by influencing their followers choice of...

In experimental investigations of the effect of real incentives, accountability—the implicit or explicit expectation of a decision maker that she may have to justify her decisions in front of somebody else—is often confounded with the incentives themselves. This confounding of accountability...

We investigate the implications of imposing balanced consistency and balanced cost reduction in the context of sequencing problems. Balanced consistency requires that the effect on the payoff from the departure of one agent to another agent should be equal between any two agents. On the other...

The main purpose of the present paper is to disentangle the mix-up of the notions of success and satisfaction which is prevailing in the voting power literature. We demonstrate that both notions are conceptually distinct, and discuss their relationship and measurement. We show that satisfaction...

Health shocks are among the most important unprotected risks for microfinance clients, but the take-up of micro health insurance typically remains limited. This pa- per attributes low enrollment rates to a social dilemma. Our theory is that in jointly liable groups, insurance is a public good....

This paper proposes a new measure for a group's ability to lead society to adopt their standard of behavior, which in particular takes account of the time the group takes to convince the whole society to adopt their position. This notion of a group's power to initiate action is computed as the...