Attempts to improve thinking and reasoning assume that people do not think as well as they might. The actual conduct of thinking does not measure up to an ideal standard. For example, I and others have argued that people are often biased toward views they already hold. They often fail to consider alternative views, counter-evidence, or goals that their favorite plans will subvert. In making thi...

One of the most robust phenomena in the experimental literature on multilateral bargaining is the failure of proposers to extract equilibrium rents. However, all previous experiments have overlooked the fact that outside the lab committee members are allowed to and do engage in sometimes intense communication processes prior to voting on a proposal. We conduct an experimental test of the Baron-...

We develop a general theory for the emergence of minority governments in multiparty parliamentary systems using a bargaining model in the tradition of Baron and Ferejohn, 1989. We show that generically (i.e. except for a set of Lebesgue measure zero in the space of the model’s parameters) minority governments form with strictly positive probability when office utility from cabinet positions is ...