Power indices are mappings that quantify the influence of the members of a voting body on collective decisions a priori. Their nonlinearity and discontinuity makes it difficult to compute inverse images, i.e., to determine a voting system which induces a power distribution as close as possible...

We introduce the prediction value (PV) as a measure of players' informational importance in probabilistic TU games. The latter combine a standard TU game and a probability distribution over the set of coalitions. Player i's prediction value equals the difference between the conditional...

wer index research has been a very active field in the last decades. Will this continue or are all the important questions solved? We argue that there are still many opportunities to conduct useful research with and on power indices. Positive and normative questions keep calling for theoretical...

Players in a committee, council, or electoral college often wield asymmetric numbers of votes. Binary decision environments are then conventionally modeled as weighted voting games. We introduce weighted committee games in order to describe decisions on three or more alternatives in similarly...

Classical power index analysis considers the individual's ability to influence the aggregated group decision by changing its own vote, where all decisions and votes are assumed to be binary. In many practical applications we have more options than either yes or no. Here we generalize three...

Executive Directors of the International Monetary Fund elect the Fund’s Managing Director from a shortlist of three candidates; financial quotas of IMF members define the respective numbers of votes. The implied a priori distribution of success (preference satisfaction) is compared across...

Traditional power indices ignore preferences and strategic interaction. Equilibrium analysis of particular non-cooperative decision procedures is unsuitable for normative analysis and assumes typically unavailable information. These points drive a lingering debate about the right approach to...

The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful codecision makers', understanding of the final stage of the procedure...

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act...

The paper investigates the effects of intra-family talent transmission when human capital exhibits indivisibilities and parental financing of education involves borrowing constraints. Positive talent correlation reduces social mobility but steady state inequality and macroeconomic...