Social Choice and Strategic Decisions

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XVI

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2. Introduction and Overview

   • David Austen-Smith, John Duggan

   Pages 1-14

3. Probabilistic Voting in the Spatial Model of Elections: The Theory of Office-motivated Candidates

   • Jeffrey S. Banks, John Duggan

   Pages 15-56

4. Local Political Equilibria

   • Norman Schofield

   Pages 57-91

5. Electoral Competition Between Two Candidates of Different Quality: The Effects of Candidate Ideology and Private Information

   • Enriqueta Aragones, Thomas R. Palfrey

   Pages 93-112

6. Party Objectives in the “Divide a Dollar” Electoral Competition

   • Jean-François Laslier

   Pages 113-130

7. Generalized Bandit Problems

   • Rangarajan K. Sundaram

   Pages 131-162

8. The Banks Set and the Uncovered Set in Budget Allocation Problems

   • Bhaskar Dutta, Matthew O. Jackson, Michel Le Breton

   Pages 163-199

9. Experiments in Majoritarian Bargaining

   • Daniel Diermeier, Rebecca Morton

   Pages 201-226

10. Legislative Coalitions in a Bargaining Model with Externalities

    • Randall L. Calvert, Nathan Dietz

    Pages 227-247

11. Testing Theories of Lawmaking

    • Keith Krehbiel, Adam Meirowitz, Jonathan Woon

    Pages 249-268

12. Deliberation and Voting Rules

    • David Austen-Smith, Timothy Feddersen

    Pages 269-316

13. Back Matter

    Pages 317-319

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Social choices, about expenditures on government programs, or about public policy more broadly, or indeed from any conceivable set of alternatives, are determined by politics. This book is a collection of essays that tie together the fields spanned by Jeffrey S. Banks' research on this subject. It examines the strategic aspects of political decision-making, including the choices of voters in committees, the positioning of candidates in electoral campaigns, and the behavior of parties in legislatures. The chapters of this book contribute to the theory of voting with incomplete information, to the literature on Downsian and probabilistic voting models of elections, to the theory of social choice in distributive environments, and to the theory of optimal dynamic decision-making. The essays employ a spectrum of research methods, from game-theoretic analysis, to empirical investigation, to experimental testing.

• Bargaining
• Decision-Making
• Elections
• Game Theory
• Government
• Social Choice
• Voting

• Department of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

  David Austen-Smith

• W. Allen Wallis Institute of Political Economy, University of Rochester, Rochester, USA

  John Duggan

Policies and ethics