Motivated by the need for more flexible decision-making mechanisms in the European Union, the paper proposes a simple but novel voting scheme for binary decisions taken by committees that meet regularly over time. At each meeting, committee members are allowed to store their vote for future use; the decision is then taken according to the majority of votes cast. The possibility of shifting votes intertemporally allows agents to concentrate their votes when preferences are more intense, and although the scheme will not in general achieve full efficiency, making votes storable typically leads to ex ante welfare gains. The analysis in the paper suggests that the result will hold if one of the following conditions is satisfied: (i) the number of voters is above a minimum threshold; (ii) preferences are not too polarized; (iii) the horizon is long enough.

Incomplete information creates matching friction that interferes with the ability of prices to allocate scarce resources across countries but can be overcome by international information‐sharing networks. When the difference between country factor‐endowment ratios is large relative to network ties, efficient arbitrage breaks down, the price (wage) of each country's immobile resource becomes partially insulated from changes in foreign supply, and trade liberalisation causes less resource price convergence. The model is applied to the trade and wages debate, to whether ties can reduce world welfare through trade diversion, and to the effect of ties on trade in differentiated versus homogeneous products.

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