Decision making in committees: transparency, reputation, and voting rules.

In this paper I analyze the effect of the transparency of the decision making process in committees on the decisions that are eventually taken. I focus on committees whose members are motivated by career concerns, so that each member tries to enhance his own reputation. When the decision making process is secretive, the individual votes of the committee members are not exposed to the public but only the final decision. Thus, individuals are evaluated according to the group's decision. I find that in such a case, group members are induced to comply with preexisting biases. For example, if the voting rule demands a supermajority to accept a reform, individuals vote more often against reforms and exacerbate the conservatism of the voting rule. When the decision making process becomes transparent and individual votes are observed, this effect disappears and such committees are then more likely to accept reforms. I also find that coupled with the right voting rule, a secretive procedure may induce better decisions than a transparent one.

Anti-herding and strategic consultation.

In this paper I analyze how careerist decision makers aggregate and use information provided by others. I find that decision makers who are motivated by reputation concerns tend to ‘anti-herding’, i.e., they excessively contradict public information such as the prior or others’ recommendations. I also find that some decision makers may deliberately act unilaterally and not consult advisers although advice is costless. Moreover, advisers to the decision maker may not report their information truthfully. Even if the advisers care only about the outcome, they bias their recommendation since they anticipate inefficient anti-herding behavior by the decision maker.

Careerist judges.

uncover during deliberations as well as relevant information from previous decisions. I assume that judges have reputation concerns and try to signal to an evaluator that they can interpret the law correctly. If an appeal is brought, the appellate court's decision reveals whether the judge interpreted the law properly and allows the evaluator to assess the judge's ability. The monitoring possibilities for the evaluator are therefore endogenous, because the probability of an appeal depends on the judge's decision. I find that judges with career concerns tend to be "creative," i.e., to inefficiently contradict previous decisions.

Public Education for the Minority,Private Education for the Majority

Public provision of private goods such as education is usually viewed as a form of redistribution in kind. However, does it arise when income redistribution is feasible as well? In this paper I analyse a two-dimensional model of political decision making. Society has to choose both the tax rate and the allocation of the revenues between income redistribution and public provision of education. The political process that I analyse involves endogenous parties. Parties have a unique role in the model; I assume that parties increase the commitment ability of politicians and, as a result, increase the ability of different groups in society to compromise with one another. I find that public provision of education arises as an anti-majoritarian outcome; public provision of education arises only when those who benefit from education, e.g., voters with children, are a minority. The reason is that when education is consumed only by a minority, such redistribution in kind is 'cheap' relative to universal income redistribution, i.e., it can be effectively provided even with low taxes. Public provision of education arises then as a political compromise offered by the party of the poor who benefit from education and the rich voters who prefer low taxes. Thus, when those who benefit from education are a minority, it is publicly provided. When those who benefit from education are a majority, they have to buy private education, since there is no public provision of this good.Education, redistribution, political parties.

Careerist Judges

In this paper I analyse how careerist judges formulate their decisions using information they uncover during deliberations as well as relevant information from previous decisions. I assume that judges have reputation concerns and try to signal to an evaluator that they can interpret the law correctly. If an appeal is brought, the appellate court's decision reveals whether the judge interpreted the law properly and allows the evaluator to assess the judge's ability. The monitoring possibilities for the evaluator are therefore endogenous, because the probability of an appeal depends on the judge's decision. I find that judges with career concerns tend to contradict previous decisions inefficiently. I also show that judges behave more efficiently when elected by the public than when appointed by fellow superior judges.Career concerns, judicial decision-making.

Multidimentional Cheap Talk

In this paper, we extend the cheap talk model of Crawford and Sobel (1982) to a multidimensional state space. We provide a characterization of informative equilibria. Most importantly, we prove for a generic family of distribution functions, that no information transmission is feasible when the conflict between the sender and the receiver is too large. Thus, adding more dimensions cannot improve upon information revelation when interests are too divergentCheap Talk

Religious Organizations

We propose a model of religious organizations which relies on the ability of such organi-zations and personal utility shocks. We show how religious organizations arise endogenously and characterize their features. Specifically, we find that members of the religious organization share similar beliefs and are more likely to cooperate with one another in social interactions. We identify a "spiritual" as well as a "material" payoff for members of the religious organization. Our results explain and shed light on empirical phenomena such as the effects of secularization and economic development on religious beliefs and participation, the relation between the size of the religion and the intensity of its members’ beliefs, religious segregation and religious conflicts.Economics of Religion, Religion, Organizations, Beliefs

Gradualism in Dynamic Agenda Formation

We analyze a dynamic model of agenda formation in which players compete in each period to put their ideal policies on the agenda. In each period, with some probability, a decision maker is called upon to take an action from the agenda. We show that in any Markov equilibrium of this game, players with extreme ideal policies will always compete to be in the agenda. On the other hand, there is a positive probability that in each round a more moderate policy will arise on the agenda. Therefore, agenda formation is a gradual process which evolves to include better policies for the decision maker but at a relatively slow pace.

It takes two : an explanation of the democratic peace.

In this paper, we provide an explanation of the democratic peace hypothesis, i.e., the observation that democracies rarely fight one another. We show that in the presence of information asymmetries and strategic complements, the strategic interaction between two democracies differs from any other dyad. In our model, two democracies induce the highest probability of peaceful resolution of conflicts. But it takes two for peace; one democracy involved in a conflict does not necessarily increases the probability of a peaceful resolution compared to a conflict between two non-democratic regimes.