I introduce a simple model of representative democracy that allows for strategic parties, strategic candidates, strategic voters, and multiple districts. If the distribution of policy preferences is not too heterogeneous across and within districts, then the number of effective parties is larger under Proportional Representation than under Plurality Voting, confirming Duverger’s hypothesis, and...

We consider cheap talk by a biased expert comparing multiple issues, e.g., discussion of different spending proposals by an industry lobbyist, evaluation of different stocks by a sell-side analyst, or analysis of different topics by a biased newspaper. When the expert’s motives are sufficiently transparent, we find that cheap talk is credible and influential even when the expert strongly favors...

In this paper, we introduce a notion of epistemic equivalence between hierarchies of conditional beliefs and hierarchies of lexicographic beliefs, thus extending the standard equivalence results of Halpern (2010) and Brandenburger et al. (2007) to an interactive setting, and we show that there is a Borel surjective function, mapping each conditional belief hierarchy to its epistemically equival...

We study the problem of elicitation of subjective beliefs of an agent when the beliefs are ambiguous (the set of beliefs is a non-singleton set) and the agent’s preference exhibits ambiguity aversion; in particular, as represented by α-maxmin preferences. We construct a direct revelation mechanism such that truthful reporting of beliefs is the agent’s unique best response. The mechanism uses kn...

This paper examines the nature of partisan preferences on a range of issue scales. It compares preferences in a period of strong ideological focus, in the late eighties and early nineties, with preferences in 2000 and 2001 – a period of weak ideological focus. Where partisan preferences were formerly polarised, they are now more consensual. I argue that once positional issues now resemble valen...

This work tackles in-situ robotics: the goal is to learn a policy while the robot operates in the real-world, with neither ground truth nor rewards. The proposed approach is based on preference-based policy learning: Iteratively, the robot demonstrates a few policies, is informed of the expert’s preferences about the demonstrated policies, constructs a utility function compatible with all exper...

BACKGROUND The patient perspective is increasingly considered in healthcare policy decisions. The use of research on patient preferences seems however limited. Using the available research on patient preferences would make healthcare policy decisions more evidence-based regarding the patient perspective. Objective of this study is to investigate whether and how results of research on patient pr...

The impact of pollution and abatement policy within a stochastic endogenous growth model is analyzed. Environmental care is provided by the government and financed through income taxation and government bonds. Due to environmental preferences and partial perception of the individual’s impact on pollution, government debt influences equilibrium growth. Hence, there is an additional growth effect...

This paper presents S4P, a declarative language for specifying both users’ privacy preferences and services’ privacy policies. Preferences and policies are uniformly expressed as assertions and queries written in SecPAL extended with two modal verbs, may and will, and can express both permissions and obligations. Checking if a user’s preference is satisfied by a service’s policy is simple as it...

We study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters elect one of the candidates, effectively choosing between the two policies proposed by the candidates. We explore under which conditions candidates always propose the voters’ optima...