The presence of monitoring institutions affects quality and effort of leaders. We investigate the effect of intensified monitoring on the ability and effort of leaders for a sample of forest user groups in Ethiopia, and find experimental and non-experimental evidence of an important trade-off: monitoring increases leaders' effort but lowers their quality in terms of education and experience. This effort–ability trade-off only occurs in the presence of alternative income opportunities (affecting the opportunity cost of time) and only among a subsample of leaders with low prosocial motivation. For our context, we document that the net effect of monitoring on economic outcomes is positive.

The article addresses how merchants and wine producers interacted while oscillating between competition and collaboration in their internal relations. Spanning a period of more than a century, it addresses three chronological periods: 1900–1940, 1940–1994, and 1994 to the present. In the first, producers were able to forge a common front against the merchants in the shape of the Koöperatieve Wynbouwers Vereniging van Suid-Afrika, which was granted devolved regulatory powers over distilling wine in 1924 and then all wine in 1940. In the second, the antagonism between good and distilling producers was sublimated at a time of relative prosperity, while the merchants engaged in fierce competition. In the final phase, the regulatory system imploded while the export market re-emerged. Quality producers found common ground in appealing to terroir, whereas marginal producers supplied merchants and supermarkets with low-priced bulk wines.

We propose to establish wine rankings using scores that depend on the differences between favorable and unfavorable opinions about each wine, according to the Borda rule. Unlike alternative approaches and specifications, this method is well-defined even if the panelists’ quality relations are not required to exhibit demanding properties such as transitivity or acyclicity. As an illustration, we apply the method to rank wines assessed by different experts and compare the resulting ranking with that obtained according to Condorcet's method of majority voting.

Trust is considered an important factor for successful collective action in groups of smallholder farmers. A prime example is collective commercialization of agricultural produce through producer organizations. While previous research has focused on trust as an exogenous determinant of participation in groups, this article tests whether trust within existing groups can be improved using a training program. We conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial in rural Senegal to identify the effects of training members and/or leaders with respect to commercialization on intragroup trust. Our design allows identifying both direct treatment effects of having participated in the training and spillover effects on farmers who did not partake. Looking at different measures of trust in leaders’ competence and motives and of trust in members, we find that participating in the training significantly enhances both trust in leaders and trust in members. For trust in leaders, we also find a strong spillover effect. Our findings suggest that relatively soft and noncostly interventions such as group training appear to positively affect trust within producer organizations.

The Amish collective objection to high school education and refusal to comply with compulsory schooling laws can be interpreted with a religious-club-good framework. According to the religious-club interpretation, the Amish use the restriction on secular education as a religious prohibition and sacrifice to improve the welfare of sect members. I exploit the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Wisconsin vs. Yoder, which exempts Amish children from compulsory high school education, as a policy shock to test several key predictions of the religious-club explanations. The evidence suggests that the successful restriction on high school education helped the Amish sect exclude individuals with low religious participation, lower members' shadow cost of time, and grow the sect through higher fertility.

The voting paradox occurs when a democratic society seeking to aggregate individual preferences into a social preference reaches an intransitive ordering. However it is not widely known that the paradox may also manifest for an individual aggregating over attributes of risky objects to form a preference over those objects. When this occurs, the relation ‘stochastically greater than’ is not always transitive and so transitivity need not hold between those objects. We discuss the impact of other decision paradoxes to address a series of philosophical and economic arguments against intransitive (cyclical) choice, before concluding that intransitive choices can be justified.

Unanimity on the question of UK exit from the EU is not within reach, but this does not mean that the House of Commons or the population at large can not find a way out of the current Brexit impasse that is fair and legitimate. We discuss different voting procedures which satisfy some important principles of democracy and which can select the option that can win a majority against all other alternatives in a head-to-head majority vote. We argue that strategic considerations play an important role and we propose a procedure that works well and can help break the impasse when voters act strategically. The procedure requires (1) that all options with some minimum support are on the agenda, (2) that voting takes place in multiple rounds and (3) that in each round the alternative with the least support is eliminated until in the last round only two alternatives are left and the majority winner is selected. We discuss how this procedure can be modified to take into account that some voters may vote non-strategically and how it, in practice, could be used either in the House of Commons or in a new referendum.

Total fertility in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe has dropped to remarkably low rates (=1.4) despite continuing low rates female labor force participation and high historic fertility. We model three ways in which religion affects the demand for children – through norms, market wages, and childrearing costs. We estimate these effects using new panel data on church attendance and clergy employment for 13 European countries from 1960 to 2000, spanning the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Using nuns per capita as a proxy for service provision, we estimate fertility effects on the order of 300 to 400 children per nun. Moreover, nuns outperform priests as a predictor of fertility, suggesting that changes in childrearing costs dominate changes in theology and norms. Reduced church attendance also predicts fertility decline, but only for Catholics, not for Protestants. Service provision and attendance complement each other, a finding consistent with club models of religion.

How large should a monetary policy committee be? Which voting rule should a monetary policy committee adopt? This paper builds on Condorcet's jury theorem to analyse the relationships between committee size and voting rules in a model where policy discussions are subject to a time constraint. It suggests that in large committees majority voting is likely to enhance policy outcomes. Under unanimity (consensus) it is preferable to limit the size of the committee. Finally, supermajority voting rules are social contrivances that contribute to policy performance in a more uncertain environment, when initial policy proposals are less likely to be correct, or when payoffs are asymmetric.

Dans cet article, nous étudions la forte stabilité d'une règle de vote telle que définie par Dutta et al. [2001] par l'intermédiaire de la méthode expérimentale. Dans ce sens, une règle de vote est dite fortement stable si le vainqueur de l'élection reste inchangé après une tentative de manipulation par candidature stratégique d'un candidat potentiel. Dans le cadre d'une élection avec trois candidats en lice et d'un électorat de petite taille, nous évaluons de façon expérimentale les fréquences de la forte stabilité des règles de vote parlementaires et de la pluralité.

This article addresses the important issue of anchoring in contingent valuation surveys that use the double-bounded elicitation format. Anchoring occurs when responses to the follow-up dichotomous choice valuation question are influenced by the bid presented in the initial dichotomous choice question. Specifically, we adapt a theory from psychology to characterize respondents as those who are likely to anchor and those who are not. Using a model developed by Herriges and Shogren (1996), our method appears successful in discriminating between those who anchor and those who did not. An important result is that when controlling for anchoring – and allowing the degree of anchoring to differ between respondent groups – the efficiency of the double-bounded welfare estimate is greater than for the initial dichotomous choice question. This contrasts with earlier research that finds that the potential efficiency gain from the double-bounded questions is lost when anchoring is controlled for and that we are better off not asking follow-up questions.