David Austen-Smith & John Duggan 
Social Choice and Strategic Decisions 
Essays in Honor of Jeffrey S. Banks

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.

Table of Content

and Overview.- Probabilistic Voting in the Spatial Model of Elections: The Theory of Office-motivated Candidates.- Local Political Equilibria.- Electoral Competition Between Two Candidates of Different Quality: The Effects of Candidate Ideology and Private Information.- Party Objectives in the “Divide a Dollar” Electoral Competition.- Generalized Bandit Problems.- The Banks Set and the Uncovered Set in Budget Allocation Problems.- Experiments in Majoritarian Bargaining.- Legislative Coalitions in a Bargaining Model with Externalities.- Testing Theories of Lawmaking.- Deliberation and Voting Rules.