We consider a committee facing binary decisions on a number of proposals. If members vote sincerely and payoffs are symmetric in expectation, it can be shown that the simple majority rule is the best q-majority rule in an aggregate or expected payoff sense. We argue that this conclusion changes...

"Pendular Voting" presents a novel two-stage voting procedure: A randomly chosen citizen group votes on a proposal replacing the status quo. Depending on the outcome, a "counterproposal" ensues, that is closer to/further away from the status quo than the original proposal. All citizens vote...

Voting procedures in many democracies satisfy a weak version of fairness called equity (Bartholdi et al., 2021) while violating the standard fairness criterion of anonymity. We study equitable voting procedures when there are more than two alternatives that can be ordered on a left-right...

An extension rule assigns to each fractional tournament x (specifying, for every pair of social alternatives a and b, the proportion xab of voters who prefer a to b) a random choice function y (specifying a collective choice probability distribution for each subset of alternatives), which...

Can an ethically justifiable decision-making process be facilitated through a machine moral agent in the form of advice? The premise revolves around decision votes explicitly solicited from human individuals and based on scenarios such as the Trolley Problem, reflected in data and processed...

We investigate how reducing information costs through forced experimentation with postal voting, while holding administrative rules fixed, affects subsequent voting behavior. Leveraging a natural experiment during Bavaria’s 2020 Mayoral Elections and drawing on municipality-level...

The concept of the Condorcet winner has become central to most electoral models in the political economy literature. A Condorcet winner is the alternative preferred by a plurality in every pairwise competition; the notion of a k-winner generalizes that of a Condorcet winner. The k-winner is the...

We investigate power indices for simple games with precoalitions which distribute power among players in an external and an internal step. We extend an existing approach which uses the Public Good index both on the external level in the quotient game as well as on the internal level for...

This is the first of four articles on the 2025 German federal elections, continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 elections. We begin with the 2023/24 electoral reform, which aimed to curb the uncontrolled growth of the Bundestag caused by political developments not envisaged in...

This is the third out four papers on the 2025 German Bundestag elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 elections. In particular, this paper contributes to the discussion of the imperfection of the German 2023/24 Electoral reform in [Tangian 2025a]. We show that policy...

We consider a committee facing binary decisions on a number of proposals. If members vote sincerely and payoffs are symmetric in expectation, it can be shown that the simple majority rule is the best q-majority rule in an aggregate or expected payoff sense. We argue that this conclusion changes...