The purpose of this exercise is to use economic theory to analyze some collective decision making outcome or public policy. You can examine either the effects of this policy on the allocation of society's resources, or you can study how or why the policy came to be adopted in the first place. The collective decision making entity that is the focus of your analysis can be an electorate, a legislature (federal, state, local), a bureaucracy or executive agency, a court, an "informal" government (mafia, gang, warlord), a club, a committee or board, or even a supranational organization (UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO). Alternatively, instead of studying a particular policy or decision, you can investigate the set of rules (constitution) or institutions (formal or informal) which regulate the decision making process. In this case, you can explain either the origin of the rules or how the rules affect the ultimate decisions made.

The paper must be an original piece of work. Plagiarism (e.g., copying-and-pasting from a web site without acknowledgement of the source) will result in a grade of zero being assigned to the paper.

All sources used in the paper must be listed alphabetically by author in a "List of References" appearing at the end of the paper. Do not list items that are not cited in the paper. Use a consistent style of footnotes, endnotes or textual references to cite sources.