We study the design of voting rules for committees representing heterogeneous groups (countries, states, districts) when cooperation among is voluntary. While efficiency recommends weighting proportionally to their stakes, we show that accounting participation constraints entails overweighting some groups, those which incentive cooperate lowest. When collective decisions are not enforceable, in...

Laboratory evidence shows that when people have to argue for a given position, they persuade themselves about the position’s factual and moral superiority. Such self-persuasion limits potential of communication resolve conflict reduce polarization. We test this phenomenon in field setting, at international debating competitions randomly assign experienced motivated debaters one side topical mot...

This note introduces a model of contests with random noise and a shared prize that combines features of Tullock (1980) and Lazear and Rosen (1981). Similar to results in Lazear and Rosen, as the level of noise decreases the equilibrium effort rises. As the noise variance approaches zero, the equilibrium effort of the shared-prize contest approaches that of a Tullock lottery contest. JEL Classif...

Recent studies suggest psychological differences between conservatives and liberals, including that conservatives are more overconfident. We use a behavioral political economy model to show that while this is undoubtedly true for election years in the current era, there is no reason to believe that conservative ideologies are intrinsically linked to overconfidence. Indeed, it appears that in 19...

This paper studies the advantages that a coalition of agents in a larger electorate can obtain by forming a voting bloc to pool their votes and cast them all in one direction. We show under which conditions an agent will benefit from the formation of the voting bloc, whether being part of it or stepping out is most advantageous for an individual agent and what are the different optimal internal...

We study the welfare properties of majority and supermajority rules when voting is voluntary and costly. Voters in the model have private values with differing preference intensities and voting costs. Our model is non-parametric– with only weak assumptions on the distribution of the number of eligible voters, preferences and costs. We show that, in large elections, majority rule is utilitarian ...

Why does the current wave of globalization create more public concern/opposition than previous rounds of trade liberalization? This paper identifies a key difference between globalization and trade liberalization that could be responsible for it. It is shown that while both globalization and trade liberalization create inter-sector income distribution, the former also creates intra-sector incom...

Tournaments and Multiple Productive Inputs: The Case of Performance Enhancing Drugs In this paper I consider the desirability of drugs that enhance cognitive abilities in the context of tournaments that are used as optimal labor contracts as in Lazear and Rosen (1981). Such drugs reduce the number of voluntary participants in a tournament, but increase individual and total output. If the tourna...

This note studies the choice of tax structure in a majority voting model with tax competition. Regions may tax mobile capital or immobile labor. Individuals differ with respect to their relative endowments of labor and capital. Even though a lump sum tax is available, the equilibrium capital tax in a jurisdiction may be positive. In a symmetric equilibrium, this will be true if the median capit...

In this note we analyze whether a federal transfer system can be designed to increase welfare when state governments create political budget cycles. The results show how the federal government can counteract the welfare costs of these cycles, without hindering politicians from signaling their type, by announcing a transfer scheme to subsidize expenditures that voters do not consider when voting...