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...

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

In its 2018 introduction and subsequent work, Quadratic Funding (QF) emerged as a uniquely optimal design for the democratic provision of public goods under the assumption of atomized participants with perfect rationality. In this paper, we aim to move past this rational and atomized portrayal...

Social networks tend to shape our views about the world. Our study conducts an empirical analysis of social network dynamics using Twitter data. We ask whether social networks influence voting decisions, and determine whether or not people vote 'correctly' based on their tweets or what they...

There is empirical evidence suggesting that a person's family, friends, or social ties influence who a person votes for. Sokhey and McClurg (2012) find that as political disagreement in a person's social network increases, then a person is less likely to vote correctly. We develop a model where...

We develop a model in which costly voting in a large two-party election is a sequentially rational choice of strategic, self-interested players who can reward fellow voters by forming stronger ties in a network formation coordination game. The predictions match a variety of stylized facts,...

We study private communication in social networks prior to a majority vote on two alternative policies. Some (or all) agents receive a private imperfect signal about which policy is correct. They can, but need not, recommend a policy to their neighbors in the social network prior to the vote. We...

Building on the concept of reciprocity in directed weighted networks, we propose a framework to study legislative vote trading. We first discuss the conditions to quantify vote trading empirically. We then illustrate how a simple empirical framework--complementary to existing approaches--can...

This paper studies a multiple-receiver Bayesian persuasion model, where a sender communicates with receivers who have homogeneous beliefs and aligned preferences. The sender wants to implement a proposal and commits to a communication strat- egy which sends private (possibly) correlated messages...