Social choice and strategic decisions : essays in honor of Jeffrey S. Banks ; with 17 tables Social choices about expenditures on government programs or about public policy more broadly or indeed from any conceivable set of alternatives are determined by politics. This book is a collection of essays that tie together the fields spanned by Jeffrey S. Banks research on this subject. It examines the strategic aspects of political decision making including the choices of voters in committees the positioning of candidates in electoral campaigns and the behavior of parties in legislatures. The chapters of this book contribute to the theory of voting with incomplete information to the literature on Downsian and probabilistic voting models of elections to the theory of social choice in distributive environments and to the theory of optimal dynamic decision making. The essays employ a spectrum of research methods from game theoretic analysis to empirical investigation to experimental testing