We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at hand, thereby irrevocably exercising their right to vote....

We study a model of endogenous means testing where households differ in their income and where the in-kind transfer received by each household declines with income. Majority voting determines the two dimensions of public policy: the size of the welfare program and the means-testing rate. We...

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

We conduct an experiment in which groups are tasked with evaluating the truth of a set of politically relevant facts and statements, and we investigate whether communication improves information aggregation and the accuracy of group decisions. Our findings suggest that the effect of...

We consider axiomatic characterization of social choice functions when there exist a fixed number of voters. Our particular interest is in social choice functions that reflect, to some extent, positional information in voters' preference rankings as well as orders between two alternatives. More...

We fully characterize in a mass election model the set of candidates that can win with positive probability in equilibrium when the voters are allowed to vote for as many candidates as they want. If at most two candidates can win for some undominated strategy profile (“in the race”...

The jury theorem states that based on the aggregation of competences, a group of agents will be the most capable of making the right decisions rather than one individual. However, the jury theorem is based on two restrictive hypotheses, the first being the stochastic independence of decisions....

A coin flip can be a good way to settle an election if the margin of victory is small and it is known that there is a good chance of fraud by one candidate. In that case, however, an even better rule is to award victory to the apparent loser

We examine the division of resources among individuals by flexible majority rules where the majority necessary to adopt a proposal depends on the proposal itself. For instance, the size of the majority may increase with the maximal difference between the shares individuals receive. For large...