Traditionally, the virtue of democratic elections has been seen in their role as means of screening and sanctioning shirking public officials. This paper proposes a novel rationale for elections and political campaigns considering that candidates incur psychological costs of lying, in particular...

This paper analyzes a recent ballot in which two virtually identical popular initiatives, both demanding a decrease in the legal age of retirement in Switzerland, led to differences in approval rates of nearly seven percentage points. Based on this unique natural experiment, the existence of...

Can neural networks learn to select an alternative based on a systematic aggregation of conflicting individual preferences (i.e. a 'voting rule')? And if so, which voting rule best describes their behavior? We show that a prominent neural network can be trained to respect two fundamental...

In dynamic resource allocation models, the non-existence of voting equilibria is a generic phenomenon due to the multi-dimensionality of the choice space even if agents are heterogeneous only in their discount factors. Nevertheless, at each point in time there may exist a «median voter» whose...

Voting rules can be assessed from quite different perspectives: the axiomatic, the pragmatic, in terms of computational or conceptual simplicity, susceptibility to manipulation, and many others aspects. In this paper, we take the machine learning perspective and ask how 'well' a few prominent...

We study the effect on the participation rate of employing different voting rules in the context of the problem to allocate a fixed monetary budget to two different public projects. Specifically, we compare the mean rule according to which the average of the individually proposed allocations is...