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...

We investigate observed rent dissipation-the ratio of the total costs of rent seeking to the monetary value of the rent-in winner-take-all and share contests, where preferences are more general than usually assumed in the literature. With concave valuation of the rent, we find that contests can...

The paper investigates strategic campaigning in a model of redistributive politics in a society with many groups and two parties. Campaigns are informative, and parties can target campaigns to different groups. Voters are uncertain about whether parties favor special groups. The parties will...

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 efficient provision of public projects: First, flexible and double majority rules where the size of the majority...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an expert with informational superiority to decision makers who vote on a proposal. We show that an expert's simple cheap talk strategy can be surprisingly effective in persuading decision makers by polarizing or unifying their...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an outside expert with informational superiority to a group of people who make a decision by voting on a proposal. An outside expert who observes the qualities of a proposal sends a cheap talk message to decision makers with limited...

What role does polyarchy (and thus increased democracy) play in aiding the development of an international financial centre? We find support for decades of theorising that some jurisdictions use autocracy (less polyarchy) to help grow out their financial centres. We look at the growth of these...