Suchergebnisse

This essay stresses the crucial importance of logistics during the French occupation of Catalonia during the Peninsular War. The supplies found in the occupied territory were insufficient for French needs, leading to the failure of Napoleon's "war feeds war" policy in that region. It became necessary to find alternative sources and modes of supply in the midst of a permanent guerrilla war and the British blockade of Catalan ports. Logistical operations largely dominated the French campaigns, while the requirement to supply a besieged Barcelona made it nearly impossible to conquer the province and led to the collapse of French plans to incorporate Catalonia into the French Empire.

We study a Condorcet jury model where voters are driven by instrumental and expressive motives. We show that arbitrarily small amounts of expressive motives significantly affect equilibrium behavior and the optimal size of voting bodies. Enlarging voting bodies always reduces accuracy over some region. Unless conflict between expressive and instrumental preferences is very low, information does not aggregate in the limit, and large voting bodies perform no better than a coin flip in selecting the correct outcome. Thus, even when adding informed voters is costless, smaller voting bodies often produce better decisions. . Adapted from the source document.