We consider the voting behavior of Supreme Court Justices, finding evidence of co-dependencies in their votes. Coincident with changes in the party imbalance of the Court over time, sharp discontinuities in these dependencies are evident. Overall, the patterns suggest a tradeoff between...

Group decision models that contemplate the particularities of the decision-making process help organizations pursue their strategic objectives. In the financial market, the primary interest of organizations consists in ensuring financial returns, which guarantee stability for the organization....

Alliances often provide a collective good among their allies. This article offers laboratory experimental evidence that the possibility to vote for the exclusion of non-cooperating allies, i.e. ostracism, can be a powerful negative referendum to increase allies’ contributions to the collective...

Wie wirken sich politisch-institutionelle Rahmenbedingungen auf die ökonomische Leistungsfähigkeit einer Gesellschaft aus? Dieser Frage wird hier aus dem Blickwinkel der Theorie der politischen Ökonomie nachgegangen. Zunächst werden hierfür die theoretischen Grundlagen skizziert. Auf dieser...

This paper provides strong evidence supporting the long-standing speculation that decision-making in groups has a dark side, by magnifying the prevalence of anti-social behavior towards outsiders. A large-scale experiment implemented in Slovakia and Uganda (N=2,309) reveals that deciding in a...

We study committees that acquire information, deliberate and vote. A member cares about state-dependent decision payoffs and about his reputation for expertise. The state remains unobserved, even after the decision has been taken. In such inconclusive environments, in equilibrium, a member's...

We study conditions under which optimal policy experimentation can be implemented by a committee. We consider a dynamic bargaining game in which committee members choose to implement either a risky reform or a safe alternative with known returns each period. We find that when no redistribution...

We study the effect of public information on collective decision-making in committees, where members can have both common and conflicting interests. In the presence of public information, the simple and efficient vote-your-signal strategy profile no longer constitutes an equilibrium under the...

We study how the diffusion of being pivotal affects immoral outcomes. In a first set of experiments, subjects decide about agreeing to kill mice and receiving money versus objecting to kill mice and foregoing the monetary amount. In a baseline condition, subjects decide individually about the...

A distinctive perspective on governance: the building blocks -- Classical liberalism : delineating its theory of governance -- Function, structure, and process at the private-public interface -- Dynamic governance : the polycentrism process and knowledge processes -- Public choice and public...

This paper will analyze the influence that discussion has on the performance of two-player teams in an experimental beauty contest game. Teams were allowed to communicate via electronic chat. The findings suggest that teams are not more rational than individuals in terms of reasoning. However,...

We study experimentally the effectiveness of communication in common value committees exhibiting publicly known heterogeneous biases. We test models assuming respectively self-interested and strategic-, joint payoff-maximizing- and cognitively heterogeneous agents. These predict varying degrees...

Challenges in global politics like climate change, maritime piracy and fighting highly contagious diseases concern global public goods. The related policy decisions are mostly made by teams. In contrast, economic models of global public goods typically assume a single rational decision-maker. We...

Background: Individual decision-making largely influences the effectiveness of decisions and benefits of investments. Methods: In this article, a consensus model for group decision-making (GDM), based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), is developed to gather group ideas and analyze the...