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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.

We study vote buying by competing interest groups in a variety of electoral and contractual settings. While increasing the size of a voting body reduces its buyability in the absence of competition, we show that larger voting bodies may be more buyable than smaller voting bodies when interest groups compete. In contrast, imposing the secret ballot is an effective way to fight vote buying in the presence of competition, but much less so in its absence. Regardless of competition, the option to contract on both votes and outcomes is worthless, as it does not affect buyability compared to contracting only on votes. The option to contract on votes and vote shares, on the other hand, is extremely valuable: it allows the first mover to effectively nullify competition and obtain its preferred policy at almost the monopoly cost. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

We study vote buying by competing interest groups in a variety of electoral and contractual settings. While increasing the size of a voting body reduces its buyability in the absence of competition, we show that larger voting bodies may be more buyable than smaller voting bodies when interest groups compete. In contrast, imposing the secret ballot---which we model as forcing interest groups to contract on outcomes rather than votes---is an effective way to fight vote buying in the presence of competition, but much less so in its absence. We also study more sophisticated vote buying contracts

We study career choice when competition for promotion is a contest. A more meritocratic profession always succeeds in attracting the highest ability types, whereas a profession with superior promotion benefits attracts high types only if the hazard rate of the noise in performance evaluation is strictly increasing. Raising promotion opportunities produces no systematic effect on the talent distribution, while a higher base wage attracts talent only if total promotion opportunities are sufficiently plentiful.

Cover -- Contents -- I. Introduction -- II. Literature Review -- III. Baseline Model -- A. Set-Up -- B. Equilibrium -- C. Limits of Meritocracy -- D. Multiple Prize Levels -- IV. Heterogeneous Contestants -- V. Discrete Number of Contestants -- A. 2-Player Lazear-Rosen Contests -- B. n-Player Tullock Contests -- VI. Conclusion -- References -- Appendix -- A Online Appendix: -- 1. Proofs -- A. Baseline Model -- B. Heterogeneous Contestants -- C. Discrete Number of Contestants -- 2. Allowing for Concave Costs and ɳ[sub(c"/c")] [omitted] [sup(-1)] -- A. Model and Results -- B. Proofs -- Figures -- 1. Marginal Benefit versus Marginal Cost -- 2. Best Response as Function of σ -- 3. Equilibrium as Function of σ -- 4. Locus of Optimal Meritocracy and Number of Prizes -- 5. Example 2 -- 6. Interior Best Responses.