We conduct an experiment in which groups are tasked with evaluating the truth of a set of politically relevant facts and statements, and we investigate whether communication improves information aggregation and the accuracy of group decisions. Our findings suggest that the effect of...

This paper develops and defends a new approach to belief aggregation, involving confidence in beliefs. It is characterised by a variant of the Pareto condition that enjoins respecting consensuses borne of compromise. Confidence aggregation recoups standard probability aggregation rules, such as...

We consider the relative robustness of libertarian anarchy and liberal democracy to meddlesome preferences. Specifically, we examine how the liberty of those wishing to engage in externally harmless activities is affected by people who wish to prevent them from doing so. We show that intense,...

We consider a framework where the optimal decision rule determining the collective choice depends in a simple way on the decision makers' posterior probabilities of a particular state of nature. Nevertheless, voting is generally an inefficient way to make collective choices and this paper sheds...

Consider the following principle regarding the performance of collective choice rules. "If a rule selects alternative x in situation 1, and alternative y in situation 2, there must be an alternative z, and some member of society whose appreciation of z relative to x has increased when going from...

We extend the Institutional Possibility Frontier (IPF) — a theoretical framework depicting the institutional trade-offs between the dual costs of dictatorship and disorder (Djankov et al. 2003) — by incorporating the notion of subjective costs. The costs of institutional choice are not...

John Searle has argued against the viability f strong versions of artificial intelligence. His most well-known counter-example is the Chinese Room thought experiment where he stressed that syntax is not semantics. We reason by analogy to highlight previously unnoticed similarities between Searle...