This paper considers a binary decision to be made by a committee - canonically, a jury - through a voting procedure. Each juror must vote on whether a defendant is guilty or not guilty. The voting rule aggregates the votes to determine whether the defendant is convicted or acquitted. We focus on...

This paper introduces excluding outlier voters (EOV) as a general mechanism for revealing true preferences in social choices, and for discouraging voters from strategic voting and manipula-tion. This mechanism is general in that it can be implemented with any voting system. The paper...

In a voting model where the set of feasible alternatives is a subset of a product set $A = A_1\times\cdots\ldots{}A_m$ of $m$ finite categories, we characterize the set of all strategy-proof social choice functions for three different types of preference domains over $A$, namely for the domains...

We prove a general possibility result for collective decision problems where individual allocations are one-dimensional, preferences are single-peaked (strictly convex), and feasible allocation profiles cover a closed convex set. Special cases include the celebrated median voter theorem (Black...

Utilitarian voting (UV) is defined in this paper as any voting rule that allows the voter to rank all of the alternatives by means of the scores permitted under a given voting scale. Specific UV rules that have been proposed are approval voting, allowing the scores 0, 1; range voting, allowing...

This paper analyzes responsibility attributions for outcomes of collective decision making processes. In particular, we ask if decision makers are blamed for being pivotal if they implement an unpopular outcome in a sequential voting process. We conduct an experimental voting game in which...

Democratic societies have been increasingly confronted with extreme, knife-edge election outcomes that affect everybody's lives and contribute to social instability. Even if political compromises based on social conventions as equity or economic arguments as efficiency are available, polarized...

Democratic societies have been increasingly confronted with extreme, knife-edge election outcomes that affect everybody’s lives and contribute to social instability. Even if political compromises based on social conventions as equity or economic arguments as efficiency are available, polarized...

Before a group can take a decision, its members must agree on a mechanism to aggregate individual preferences. In this paper we present the results of an experiment on the influence of private payoff information and the role of the available alternatives on individuals’ mechanism choices in...