This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on...

The difficulty of optimal decision making in uncertain dichotomous choice settings is that it requires information on the expertise of the decision makers (voters). This paper presents a method of optimally weighting voters even without testing them against questions with known right answers....

This essay explores the legacy of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock as it pertains to the establishment of public choice as a field of scholarly inquiry. The Calculus of Consent is surely the Ur-text for capturing that legacy, yet that legacy can be discerned in two distinct directions. One...

Collective contests are examined permitting heterogeneity of stakes within every competing group. Our first concern is whether unequal distribution of stakes in a group can enhance its win probability. Our second concern is whether a large stake in a group can be individually disadvantageous. We...

We study two related versions of the no-impatience postulate in the context of transitive and reflexive relations on infinite utility streams which are not necessarily complete. Both are excluded by the traditional (weak) anonymity axiom. We show explicit social welfare relations satisfying...

Public Choice research and the growth of government show a marked paradox: While the importance of Public Choice has declined, the importance of the public sector has grown. This paper empirically presents the development of Public Choice over time using several different measurement approaches....

We introduce a democratic procedure with voting-based proposals called ”Pendular Voting”. It works as follows: An agenda-setter chooses a proposal meant to replace a given status quo. In the first stage, a random sample of the population votes on the proposal. The result is made public,...