Behavioral economics presents a "paternalistic" rationale for government intervention. Current literature focuses on benevolent government. This paper introduces politicians who may indulge/exploit these behavioral biases. We present an analysis of the novel features that arise when the...

Many committees—juries, political task forces, etc.—spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting...

Behavioral economics presents a "paternalistic" rationale for a benevolent government's intervention. We consider an economy where the only “distortion” is agents’ time inconsistency. We study the desirability of various forms of collective action, ones pertaining to costly commitment and...

We present a dynamic model of sequential information acquisition by a heterogeneous committee. At each date agents decide whether to vote to adopt one of two alternatives or continue to collect more information. The process stops when a qualified majority vote for an alternative. Three main...

We present a dynamic model of deliberation in which `jurors' decide every period whether to continue deliberation, which generates costly information, or stop and take a binding vote yielding a decision. For homogeneous juries, the model is a reinterpretation of the classic Wald (1947)...