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Majority voting is the predominant mechanism for collective decision making. It is used in a broad range of applications, spanning from national referenda to small group decision making. It is simple, transparent, and induces voters to vote sincerely. However, it is increasingly recognized that it has some weaknesses. First of all, majority voting may lead to inefficient outcomes. This happens because it does not allow voters to express the intensity of their preferences. As a result, an indifferent majority may win over an intense minority. In addition, majority voting suffers from the “tyranny of the majority,” i.e., the risk of repeatedly excluding minority groups from representation. A final drawback is the “winner-take-all” nature of majority voting, i.e., it offers no compensation for losing voters. Economists have recently proposed various alternative mechanisms that aim to produce more efficient and more equitable outcomes. These can be classified into three different approaches. With storable votes, voters allocate a budget of votes across several issues. Under vote trading, voters can exchange votes for money. Under linear voting or quadratic voting, voters can buy votes at a linear or quadratic cost respectively. The properties of different alternative mechanisms can be characterized using theoretical modeling and game theoretic analysis. Lab experiments are used to test theoretical predictions and evaluate their fitness for actual use in applications. Overall, these alternative mechanisms hold the promise to improve on majority voting but have their own shortcomings. Additional theoretical analysis and empirical testing is needed to produce a mechanism that robustly delivers efficient and equitable outcomes.

Conflicts are a ubiquitous part of our life. One of the main reasons behind the initiation and escalation of conflict is the identity, or the sense of self, of the engaged parties. It is hence not surprising that there is a consistent area of academic literature that focuses on identity, conflict, and their interaction. This area models conflicts as contests and focuses on the theoretical, experimental, and empirical literature from economics, political science, and psychology. The theoretical literature investigates the behavioral aspects—such as preference and beliefs—to explain the reasons for and the effects of identity on human behavior. The theoretical literature also analyzes issues such as identity-dependent externality, endogenous choice of joining a group, and so on. The applied literature consists of laboratory and field experiments as well as empirical studies from the field. The experimental studies find that the salience of an identity can increase conflict in a field setting. Laboratory experiments show that whereas real identity indeed increases conflict, a mere classification does not do so. It is also observed that priming a majority–minority identity affects the conflict behavior of the majority, but not of the minority. Further investigations explain these results in terms of parochial altruism. The empirical literature in this area focuses on the various measures of identity, identity distribution, and other economic variables on conflict behavior. Religious polarization can explain conflict behavior better than linguistic differences. Moreover, polarization is a more significant determinants of conflict when the winners of the conflict enjoy a public good reward; but fractionalization is a better determinant when the winners enjoy a private good reward. As a whole, this area of literature is still emerging, and the theoretical literature can be extended to various avenues such as sabotage, affirmative action, intra-group conflict, and endogenous group formation. For empirical and experimental research, exploring new conflict resolution mechanisms, endogeneity between identity and conflict, and evaluating biological mechanisms for identity-related conflict will be of interest.