In financial markets, professional traders leverage their trades because it allows to trade larger positions with less margin. Violating margin requirements, however, triggers a margin call and open positions are automatically covered until requirements are met again. What impact does margin...

In reality, it is often groups rather than individuals that make decisions. In previous experiments, groups have frequently been shown to act differently from individuals in several ways. It has been claimed that inter-group interactions may be (1) more competitive, (2) more rational, or (3)...

We study the consequences of franchise extension and ballot reform for the size of government in Western Europe between 1820 and 1913. We find that franchise extension exhibits a U-shaped association with revenue per capita and a positive association with spending per capita. Instrumental...

We study a mechanism design problem under the assumption that renegotiation cannot be prevented. We investigate what kind of equilibria of which mechanisms are renegotiation-proof under a variety of renegotiation procedures, and which social choice functions can be implemented in a way that is...

The paper examines the problem of aggregating infinite utility streams with a social welfare function which respects the Anonymity and Weak Pareto Axioms. It provides a complete characterization of domains (of the one period utilities) on which such an aggregation is possible. A social welfare...

This paper investigates the nature of paths in the standard neoclassical aggregative model of economic growth that are maximal according to the Suppes-Sen grading principle. This is accomplished by relating such paths to paths which are utilitarian maximal when an increasing (but not necessarily...

In this paper we re-examine the axiomatic basis of the key result on weighted utilitarian representation of preference orders on finite utility streams. We show that a preference order satisfying the axioms of Minimal Individual Symmetry, Invariance and Strong Pareto need not have a...

This paper argues that high political competition does not necessarily induce policy makers to perform better as previous research has shown. We develop a political economy model and we show that when political competition is tight, and elected politicians can rely on more tax instruments, they...

The traditional model of sequential decision making, for instance, in extensive form games, is a tree. Most texts define a tree as a connected directed graph without loops and a distinguished node, called the root. But an abstract graph is not a domain for decision theory. Decision theory...

While most papers on team decision-making find that teams behave more selfishly, less trustingly and less altruistically than individuals, Cason and Mui (1997) report that teams are more altruistic than individuals in a dictator game. Using a within-subjects design we re-examine group...