Advances in Collective Decision Making

This book presents research on recent developments in collective decision-making. With contributions from leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, it provides an up-to-date overview of applications in social choice theory, welfare economics, and industrial organization. The contributions address, amongst others, topics such as measuring power, the manipulability of collective decisions, and experimental approaches. Applications range from analysis of the complicated institutional rules of the European Union to responsibility-based allocation of cartel damages or the design of webpage rankings. With its interdisciplinary focus, the book seeks to bridge the gap between different disciplinary approaches by pointing to open questions that can only be resolved through collaborative efforts.

Sascha Kurz is a professor of mathematics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research interests are in the intersection of mathematics and computer science and comprise the analysis of discrete structures in general. Examples are voting systems and topics from coding theory like divisible codes and network coding. Nicola Maaser is an associate professor of economics at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research focuses on collective decision-making and its policy consequences. She approaches questions in this field through theoretical modelling, empirical analysis, and laboratory experiments. Alexander Mayer is a postdoctoral researcher in economics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is interested in strategic interactions and collective decisions. His research develops and applies theoretical methods of social choice theory and game theory.