Consider a voting procedure where countries, states, or districts comprising a union each elect representatives who then participate in later votes at the union level on their behalf. The countries, provinces, and states may vary in their populations and composition. If we wish to maximize the...

We study indirect democracy in which countries, states, or districts each elect a representative who later votes at a union level on their behalf. We show that the voting rule that maximizes the total expected utility of all agents in the union involves assigning a weight to each district's vote...

A collective action or revolt succeeds only if sufficiently many people participate. We study how potential revolutionaries' ability to coordinate is affected by what they learn from different sources. We first examine how people learn about the likelihood of a revolution's success by talking to...