This paper studies coalition formation under asymmetric information. An outside party offers private payments in order to influence the collective decision over an unpopular reform. The willingness to accept such payments is private information. The paper demonstrates that a supermajority...

This paper studies coalitional strategy-proofness of social choice correspondences that map preference profiles into sets of alternatives. In particular, we focus on the Pareto rule, which associates the set of Pareto optimal alternatives with each preference profile, and examine whether or not...

Experiments evaluate the fit of human behaviour to the Shapley-Shubik power index (SSPI), a formula of voter power. Groups of six subjects with differing votes divide a fixed purse by majority rule in online chat rooms. Earnings proxy for measured power. Chat rooms and processes for selecting...

One feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power. Game-theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote...

The paper analyzes a communication game between a decision-maker and a reputationally concerned expert drawn from a population of informed and uninformed experts. It departs from the literature [e.g. (Ottaviani and Sorensen(2006), Scharfstein and Stein (1990)] by considering the possibility that...

Early results on the emptiness of the core and the majority-rule-chaos results led to the recognition of the importance of modeling institutional details in political processes. A sample of the literature on game-theoretic models of political phenomena that ensued is presented. In the case of...

We provide an explanation for why committees may behave over-cautiously. A committee of experts makes a decision on a proposed innovation on behalf of 'society'. Each expert's signal about the innovation's quality is generated by the available evidence and the best practices of the experts'...

In this paper, we consider a committee of experts that decides whether to approve or reject a proposed innovation on behalf of society. In addition to a payoff linked to the adequateness of the committee's decision, each expert receives a disesteem payoff if he/she voted in favor of an ill-fated...

Existing theoretical and experimental studies have established that unanimity is a poor decision rule for promoting information aggregation. Despite this, unanimity is frequently used in committees making decisions on behalf of society. This paper shows that when committee members are exposed to...

This paper discusses the implications of strategic voting for institutional design in environments where the only role of elections is to aggregate information. We adopt a mechanism design perspective, which assumes that prior to a standard voting game, a fictitious designer has to select the...