The publication of nearly 600,000 new species occurrence maps using Global Biodiversity Information Facility data provides an opportunity to reassess international species protection with broader representation for plants, invertebrates, and other species. This development aligns with the global...

The concept of the Condorcet winner has become central to most electoral models in the political economy literature. A Condorcet winner is the alternative preferred by a plurality in every pairwise competition; the notion of a k-winner generalizes that of a Condorcet winner. The k-winner is the...

An extension rule assigns to each fractional tournament x (specifying, for every pair of social alternatives a and b, the proportion xab of voters who prefer a to b) a random choice function y (specifying a collective choice probability distribution for each subset of alternatives), which...

Using a novel dataset in a difference-in-differences framework, I study the political implications of the change in policies protecting drought-impacted communities in Tunisia in 3088 districts. In 2016, the Tunisian government had drastically reduced support to farmers affected by droughts. I...

Can an ethically justifiable decision-making process be facilitated through a machine moral agent in the form of advice? The premise revolves around decision votes explicitly solicited from human individuals and based on scenarios such as the Trolley Problem, reflected in data and processed...

The space sector has remained central to geopolitics since the end of the Cold War, leading to an increase in national space spending worldwide. This study investigates how public support for space funding is influenced by information about (i) national space spending, (ii) the spending of...

Voting procedures in many democracies satisfy a weak version of fairness called equity (Bartholdi et al., 2021) while violating the standard fairness criterion of anonymity. We study equitable voting procedures when there are more than two alternatives that can be ordered on a left-right...

I analyze Dutch survey data that contains rich information on political preferences, personality traits, and socioeconomic background. I show that voting and political opinions are better predicted by personality and economic preferences than by a rich set of socioeconomic characteristics....

We present a self- and social-signaling model formalizing findings in political psychology that moral and political judgments stem primarily from intuition and emotion, while reasoning serves to rationalize these intuitions to maintain an image of impartiality. In social interactions, agents’...

When environmental regulations are unpopular, policymakers often attribute resistance to information frictions and poor communication. We test this idea in the context of a major climate policy: Germany’s Heating Law of 2023, which mandates the phase-out of fossil fuel heating. Through a...

We evaluate the impact of a recent reform that sharply increased the salaries of Italian local politicians on electoral competition and the valence attributes of the candidates elected. Exploiting misaligned election dates across Italian cities, we propose a novel methodology, the time-shifted...

Who drives social change - the people or activist elites? While progressive reforms are often championed by elites, their preferences may diverge from those of the broader group they aim to represent, producing unintended political consequences. We study this dynamic in the context of female...

"Pendular Voting" presents a novel two-stage voting procedure: A randomly chosen citizen group votes on a proposal replacing the status quo. Depending on the outcome, a "counterproposal" ensues, that is closer to/further away from the status quo than the original proposal. All citizens vote...

We present simple and direct arguments to characterize strongly group strategy-proof social choice functions whose range is of cardinality two. The underlying society is of arbitrary cardinality, and agents can be indifferent among alternatives.

Recently, it has been shown that the characterizations of different classes of non-manipulable social choice functions with binary range can be reduced to a common functional form. In the present paper, we investigate the reasons why this happens. We show that all the classes considered share a...

Majority voting is considered an efficient information aggregation mechanism in committee decision-making. We examine if this holds in environments where voters first need to acquire information from sources of varied quality and cost. In such environments, efficiency may depend on free-riding...