Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the...

We analyze different committee designs in a model with the endogenous participation of experts who have private information about their own abilities. Each committee design involves a test of abilities whose accuracy influences experts’ decisions to participate. We derive the following...

We propose a two-period model of a committee with sequentially voting members, who may differ in their degree of efficiency. In this model we examine whether the publication of the committee's voting records is desirable. We show that first-period welfare is higher if voting records remain...

We suggest that flexible majority rules for currency issuance decisions foster the stability of a cryptocurrency. With flexible majority rules, the voteshare needed to approve a particular currency issuance growth is increasing with this growth rate. By choosing suitable parameters for these...

In this paper we examine how individuals should be treated with respect to taxes, subsidies and agenda setting in constitutions in order to obtain efficient allocations of public goods and to limit tax distortions. We show that if public goods are socially desirable, the simple majority rule as...

We introduce democratic mechanisms where individual utilities are not observable by other people at the legislative stage. We show that the combination of three rules can yield e±cient provision of public projects: first, flexible and double majority rules where the size of the majority depends...