This paper examines optimal decision making under three different organizational forms: committees, hierarchies and polyarchies. Our focus is on the trade-off between errors of rejecting good projects versus errors of accepting bad projects, and on the trade-off between gains from more extensive...

At the invitation of Virginia Senator George Barker, Professor Pearson testified before the Commonwealth of Virginia, Division of Legislative Service, Virginia Housing Commission for a working group on continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs). In her oral and written testimony, she...

This essay argues that organizations (here, the Milbank, Tweed law firm) often ignore obviously bad behavior by their employees because of various psychological and sociological factors that prevent them from recognizing the behavior as bad in the first place

This paper considers a epistemic game-theoretic model of group identification which describes the evolving process of a collective action rule of the members in a social group. Group identity describes that the solutions to "who we are'' and "what we are'' questions among the members in a group....

This paper examines the usefulness of Coasian Transaction Cost Economics for describing the governance outcomes for semi-public markets, i.e. markets where some government involvement is indispensable, and where the government transacts with private parties, or provides the service in-house....

In this paper, we present a model of deliberation based on Rawls’s political liberalism. Our formalization gives a new perspective on his political theory. Moreover, we obtain quantitative results on political deliberation under Rawlsian rules. Finally, we elaborate two arguments in favor of...

Can ideas mobilize people into collective action? We provide a positive answer to this question by studying how exposure to the Communist ideology shaped an individual's choice to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the party's formative stage. The individuals we focus on are cadets at...

For centuries, juries have been hailed as a model of popular participation in government. Alexis de Tocqueville famously described the American jury as "both the most effective way of establishing the people’s rule and the most efficient way of teaching them how to rule." But even as he...

I use a model of human causal learning, Causal Support (Tenenbaum & Griffiths, 2001), to derive a meaningful measure of Cognitive Distance – the degree to which two people differ in their opinions about the workings of the world. Next, I amend this measure to quantify the notion of Cognitive...