We derive the equilibrium institutional design of representative democracy by citizens who first vote on the supermajority required for a new policy to be adopted, and then delegate decision making to a legislature that selects policy given that institutional constraint. A legislature that can freely tailor policy to reflect society’s current preferences is good. However, the views of the media...

This paper analyzes the impact of pollution and abatement policy within a stochastic endogenous growth model. The agents have environmental preferences, but they neglect their individual contribution to aggregate abatement. Therefore, environmental care is done by the government and financed via income taxation and government bonds. Equilibrium growth depends on environmental preferences, perce...

We analyze the problem of learning a single user’s preferences in an active learning setting, sequentially and adaptively querying the user over a finite time horizon. Learning is conducted via choice-based queries, where the user selects her preferred option among a small subset of offered alternatives. These queries have been shown to be a robust and efficient way to learn an individual’s pre...

Background: Delivering efficient healthcare within limited budgets requires an understanding of patient priorities. Designing services that are sensitive to patients’ preferences in the context of limited resources may require policy and decision-makers to choose between attributes. Aligning clinical practice and health policy with patient preferences will improve the effectiveness of health in...

Why do legislators sometimes engage in behavior that deviates from the expressed policy preferences of constituents who participate in politics at high rates? We examine this puzzle in the context of Democratic legislators' representation of their senior citizen constituents on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA). We find that legislators' roll-call votes on the ACA did...

Previous research has uncovered links between generalized distrust and preferences for competitive (vs. cooperative) action. However, based on individuals’ tendency to hold consistent attitudes and to believe that their own political preferences are morally legitimate, it was hypothesized that the direction of the relationship between distrust and competitive foreign policy preferences would de...

Although farmers in developing countries are generally thought to be risk averse, little is known about the actual form of their risk preferences. In this paper, we use a relatively large field experiment to explore risk preferences related to sweet potato production among a sample of farmers in northern Mozambique. We explicitly test whether preferences follow the constant relative risk aversi...

Prescriptive economics requires that, unless there are very good reasons to the contrary, economic policy should be based on the principle that individuals’ preferences should count. Indeed, the entire body of ‘welfare economics’ centres round the formal identity of the statement “X prefers A to B” and the statement “X has higher welfare in A rather than B”. This combination of a seemingly inno...

Experimental research shows that while most voters have some form of spatial preferences, individuals differ in the type of spatial preferences they have: many voters prefer candidates closer to themselves in a policy space (proximity voting), others prefer candidates that are simply on the same side of an issue as themselves (directional voting), and still others prefer those who will move pol...

In this paper we model the interaction between parties and candidates to highlight the mechanisms by which parties selecting candidates may discipline legislators. Parties are long-lived organizations providing incentives to short-lived candidates. The incentive problem parties face is very similar to the problem faced by firms that try to motivate workers. However parties are different from fi...