A contest is a situation in which individuals or groups expend costly resources while competing to win a specific prize. The variety of economic situations that can be described as contests has attracted enormous attention from economic theorists. Despite the extensive theoretical research of...

The problem of ambiguity in games is discussed, and a class of ambiguous games is identified. 195 participants played strategic-form games of various sizes with unidentified co-players. In each case, they first chose between a known-risk game involving a co-player indifferent between strategies...

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...

The goal of this paper is to show that neither mean-based voting systems nor median-based ones can fulfill requirements of an ideal democracy. We then work out an original voting function obtained by hydrizing Borda Majority Count (mean-based) and Majority Judgment (median-based). The so-called...

Impossibility theorems expose inconsistencies and paradoxes related to voting systems. Recently, Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki proposed a new voting theory called Majority Judgment which tries to circumvent this limitation. In Majority Judgment, voters are invited to evaluate candidates in...

We extend approval voting so as to elect multiple candidates, who may be either individuals or members of a political party, in rough proportion to their approval in the electorate. We analyze two divisor methods of apportionment, first proposed by Jefferson and Webster, that iteratively...

We report results from two different settings of a 3-player ultimatum game. Under the monocratic rule, a player is randomly selected to make an offer to two receivers. Under the democratic rule, all three players make a proposal, and one proposal is then extracted. A majority vote is required to...

Considerable experimental evidence has been collected on how to solve the public-good dilemma. In a 'first generation' of experiments, this was done by presenting subjects with a pre-specified game out of a huge variety of rules. A 'second generation' of experiments introduced subjects to two...

This paper uses experiments to explore electoral accountability in a legislative system that favors seniority. Voters face a trade-off between pork barrel transfers and policy representation. Term limits are tested as a mechanism to reduce the cost of searching for a legislator who better...