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...

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...

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...

"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...

This is the first of four articles on the 2025 German federal elections, continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 elections. We begin with the 2023/24 electoral reform, which aimed to curb the uncontrolled growth of the Bundestag caused by political developments not envisaged in...

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...

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.

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...

We theoretically investigate how the application of unanimity rule can lead to inefficient delay in collective decision making. We do so in the context of a distributive multilateral bargaining model featuring strategic pre-commitment. Prior to each bargaining round, players can declare a...

I analyze Dutch panel data that contains rich information on voting, political opinions, and personality traits. I show that "adversarial" preferences - competitiveness, negative reciprocity, distrust, and selfishness - are strong predictors of right-wing and populist political preferences....

This paper theoretically investigates the strategic implications of varying reliability of bargaining partners under unanimous and non-unanimous voting. Three players (one proposer, two responders) bargain over the distribution of a pie. One responder has private information about his valuation...

We consider a committee facing binary decisions on a number of proposals. If members vote sincerely and payoffs are symmetric in expectation, it can be shown that the simple majority rule is the best q-majority rule in an aggregate or expected payoff sense. We argue that this conclusion changes...

Bouton et al. (2022) compare the properties of majority run-off and plurality rule elections in a laboratory setting, focusing on Duverger's prediction that plurality rule leads to higher levels of strategic voting. They produce a causal estimate of the difference in incidence of strategic...