We analyze the voting behavior and ratings of judges in a popular song contest held every year in Europe. The dataset makes it possible to analyze the determinants of success, and gives a rare opportunity to run a direct test of vote trading, or logrolling. Though the votes cast may appear as resulting from logrolling, we show that they are rather driven by linguistic and cultural proximities b...

Within the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, the subfield of Computational Social Choice considers the application of AI techniques to problems in Social Choice [3]. Social Choice is the theoretical study of elections and voting systems, and is sometimes referred to as “Voting Theory” instead. It has historical roots in 18th century academics’ attempts to determine which voting sy...

We report experiments on the following lobbying game. Two lobbyists have identical budgets and simultaneously distribute them across voters in a legislature. Each voter votes for the lobbyist who pays them most and the lobbyist who receives most votes wins a prize. Taking the share of the budget distributed to a voter as a measure of the voter‟s voting power we investigate how voting power vari...

In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a collective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents is usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made computationally difficult for the agents to perform. However, there are scenarios in which a restricted form of manipulation can instead be beneficial. In this paper we c...

In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a collective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents is usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made computationally difficult for the agents to perform. However, there are scenarios in which a restricted form of manipulation can instead be beneficial. In this paper we c...

Dual-class common stock allows for the separation of voting rights and cash flow rights across the different classes of equity. We construct a large sample of dual-class firms in the United States and analyze the relationships of insider’s cash flow rights and voting rights with firm value, performance, and investment behavior. We find that relationship of firm value to cash flow rights is posi...

One of the most influential findings of the voting behavior literature of the past two decades was the realization that the clarity of the domestic institutional context influences the relationship between economic perceptions and vote intention. This article extends this so-called “clarity of responsibility” argument beyond economics to another policy field – European integration. To what exte...

The unanimous voting rule is often viewed as analogous to voluntary market exchange. This paper demonstrates that when third-party pecuniary effects exist, this analogy breaks down because unlike markets, unanimous voting requires compensation for these effects. Thus, efficient market outcomes typically will be rejected by the unanimous voting rule. Even when transactions costs are low enough t...