Democracy resolves conflicts in difficult games like Prisoners’ Dilemma and Chicken by stabilizing their cooperative outcomes. It does so by transforming these games into games in which voters are presented with a choice between a cooperative outcome and a Pareto-inferior noncooperative...

We propose a procedure for dividing indivisible items between two players in which each player ranks the items from best to worst and has no information about the other player’s ranking. It ensures that each player receives a subset of items that it values more than the other player’s...

We propose a new voting system, satisfaction approval voting (SAV), for multiwinner elections, in which voters can approve of as many candidates or as many parties as they like. However, the winners are not those who receive the most votes, as under approval voting (AV), but those who maximize...

Assume that players strictly rank each other as coalition partners. We propose a procedure whereby they “fall back” on their preferences, yielding internally compatible, or coherent, majority coalition(s), which we call fallback coalitions. If there is more than one fallback coalition, the...

We describe a simple 2-stage mechanism that induces two bargainers to be truthful in reporting their reservation prices in a 1st stage. If these prices criss-cross, the referee reports that they overlap, and the bargainers proceed to make offers in a 2nd stage. The average of the 2nd-stage...

We suggest a new approach to narrowing the field in elections, based on the deservingness of candidates to be contenders in a runoff, or to be declared one of several winners. Instead of specifying some minimum percentage (e.g., 50) that the leading candidate must surpass to avoid a runoff...

We assume that a voter’s judgment about a proposal depends on (i) the proposal’s probability of being right (or good or just) and (ii) the voter’s probability of making a correct judgment about its rightness (or wrongness). Initially, the state of a proposal (right or wrong), and the...

Assume it is known that one player in a 2 x 2 game can detect the strategy choice of its opponent with some probability before play commences. We formulate conditions under which the detector can, by credibly committing to a strategy of probabilistic tit-for-tat (based on its imperfect...

Many procedures have been suggested for the venerable problem of dividing a set of indivisible items between two players. We propose a new algorithm (AL), related to one proposed by Brams and Taylor (BT), which requires only that the players strictly rank items from best to worst. Unlike BT, in...

Assume two players, A and B, must divide a set of indivisible items that each strictly ranks from best to worst. If the number of items is even, assume that the players desire that the allocations be balanced (each player gets half the items), item-wise envy-free (EF), and Pareto-optimal (PO)....