We consider a simple variant of the canonical model of social learning and show that in many situations it is optimal for an agent to abandon her own information and follow the minority rather than the majority. This possibility depends on two economically meaningful requirements: agents are...

I analyze symmetric majority rule voting equilibria when voters wish to elect the better candidate and to vote for the winner. When voters care only about the winning candidate (the standard formulation) a unique responsive equilibrium exists. The addition of a desire to win creates multiple...

We develop a model of experimentation and learning in policymaking when control of power is temporary. We demonstrate how an early office holder who would otherwise not experiment is nonetheless induced to experiment when his hold on power is temporary. This preemptive policy experiment is...

An emergent theme in the study of organizations is the broad differences in managerial practice and performance across firms. We develop an explanation for these phenomena that turns on the complexity of the environments that firms operate in. We construct a model that formally captures the...

In recent decades psychologists have shown that the standard model of individual choice is often violated as choices are influenced by the decision context. We propose that voting behavior may be similarly influenced and we introduce a theory of <italic>context-dependent voting</italic>. Context-dependence...

The role of expertise in policy making has been a focus of political science research in recent decades. Underlying formal models in this area is a conception of expertise that is very simple: expertise is a single piece of information. Combined with a condition on the set of possible processes,...

We present a model where heterogeneous districts choose both whether to experiment and the policies to experiment with. Since districts learn from each other, the first-best requires that policy experiments converge so that innovations are useful also for neighbors. However, the equilibrium...