Can fiscal policy raise utility for all in dynamic economies with unobservable agent heterogeneity, when missing credit and insurance markets affect incentives to invest in human capital? If so, should the state provide transfers to the poor in the form of cash or in kind? In an occupational...

We investigate experimentally whether collective choice matters for individual attitudes to ambiguity. We consider a two-urn Ellsberg experiment: one urn offers a 45% chance of winning a fixed monetary prize, the other an ambiguous chance. Participants choose either individually or in groups of...

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision rules...

Imposing a minimum quality standard (MQS) is conventionally regarded as harmful if firms compete in quantities. This, however, ignores dynamic effects. We show that an MQS can hinder collusion, resulting in dynamic welfare gains that reduce and may even outweigh the usual static losses. Verdicts...

Individual contributions by infringing firms to the compensation of cartel victims must reflect their 'relative responsibility for the harm caused' according to EU legislation. Several studies have argued that the theoretically best way to operationalize this norm is to apply the Shapley value...

Weighted committees allow shareholders, party leaders, etc. to wield different numbers of votes or voting weights as they decide between multiple candidates by a given social choice method. We consider committees that apply scoring methods such as plurality, Borda, or antiplurality rule. Many...

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act...

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the EU's Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal...

Traditional power indices are not suited to take account of explicit preferences, strategic interaction, and particular decision procedures. This paper studies a new way to measure decision power, based on fully specified spatial preferences and strategic interaction in an explicit voting game...