Power index research has been a very active field in the last decades. Will this continue or are all the important questions solved? We argue that there are still many opportunities to conduct useful research with and on power indices. Positive and normative questions keep calling for theoretical and empirical attention. Technical and technological improvements are likely to boost applicability.

There are many situations in which different groups make collective decisions by committee voting, with each group represented by a single person. This paper is about two closely related problems. The first is that of how to measure the inequality of a voting system in such a setting. The second is the inverse power problem: the problem of finding voting systems that approximate equal indirect voting power as well as possible. I argue that the coefficient of variation is appropriate to measure the inequality of a voting system and to specify the inverse problem. I then show how specifying the inverse problem with the coefficient of variation compares to using existing objective functions.

The question whether the position of a researcher’s last name in the alphabet matters for his or her scientific career is important. Abramo and D’Angelo (2017) attempt to answer this question and claim that they find “no evidence whatsoever that alphabetically earlier surnames gain advantage”. This stands in contrast to almost all literature on the topic (for a recent survey, see Weber, 2016). The reason that the results in Abramo and D’Angelo (2017) differ from the standard results is that the way they conduct their research is problematic and their claims are unsubstantiated.

Among the wide variety of voting power indices, the public good index (PGI) is one of the less well-known ones. Holler (2019) posits hypotheses about why this is the case. In response to these hypotheses, I share a few thoughts about voting power in general and about the popularity of the PGI.

This short case covers the recent strategic developments of Barnes & Noble, the largest US book chain, and puts them in the context of its peers worldwide (in the UK, Canada, Germany and France). The perspective of the case is the one of James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble since August 2019. Readers are put in his shoes and are asked to analyze Barnes & Noble's response strategy to an increasingly digital book market. This short case is intended to serve as part of a course session on digitalization strategies or strategic change responding to macro trends. The case can support a full 45-minute class session, or can be integrated into a 90-minute session that also includes theory input by the lecturer. The case questions are open-ended but intended to introduce frameworks to assess strategic change and response strategies to exogenous shocks.