We introduce a framework of electoral competition in which voters have general preferences over candidates' characteristics and policies. Candidates' immutable characteristics (such as gender, race or previously committed policy positions) are exogenously differentiated, while candidates can...

A small committee has to approve/reject a project with uncertain return. Members have different preferences: some are value-maximizers, others are biased towards approval. We focus on the efficient use of scarce information when communication is not guaranteed, and we provide insights on the...

A conclave is a voting mechanism in which a committee selects an alternative by voting until a sufficient supermajority is reached. We study experimentally welfare properties of simple three-voter conclaves with privately known preferences over two outcomes and waiting costs. The resulting game...

This paper reports the results of a questionnaire study used to explore the economic understanding, normative positions along the egalitarian-libertarian spectrum, and the party preferences of a large student sample. The aim of the study is both to find socio-economic determinants of normative...

We measure the importance of candidate characteristics listed on ballots for a candidate's position on a slate, for preferential votes received by a candidate, and, ultimately, for getting elected. We focus on the effects of gender, various types of academic titles, and also several novel...

This paper reconsiders the division of the literature on electoral competition into models with forward-looking voters and those with backward-looking voters by combining ideas from both strands of the literature. As long as there is no uncertainty about voters' policy preferences and parties...

A standard finding in the literature on political agency is that voters punish incumbents who raise taxes. Typically, only the reaction of a representative voter is considered, with the notion that all voters dislike high taxes because the revenue is, at least on the margin, spent on...

This paper reconsiders the division of the literature on electoral competition into models with forward-looking voters and those with backward-looking voters by combining ideas from both strands of the literature. As long as there is no uncertainty about voters' policy preferences and parties...

We study a vote buying setup where a committee votes on a proposal important to the vote buyer. We characterize the cheapest combination of bribes that guarantees the proposal's passing in different voting environments. We find that for both simultaneous and sequential votes, the vote buyer...

If voter preferences depend on a noisy state variable, under what conditions do large elections deliver outcomes quot;as ifquot; the state were common knowledge? While the existing literature models elections using the jury metaphor where a change in information regarding the state induces...