Favoritism is the act of offering jobs, contracts and resources to members of one's social group in preference to outsiders. Favoritism is widely practiced and this motivates an exploration of its origins and economic consequences. Our main finding is that individuals have an interest to trade...

Drissi-Bakhkhat and Truchon ["Maximum Likelihood Approach to Vote Aggregation with Variable Probabilities," Social Choice and Welfare, 23, (2004), 161-185.] extend the Condorcet-Kemeny-Young maximum likelihood approach to vote aggregation by relaxing the assumption that the probability of...

If individual voters observe the true ranking on a set of alternatives with error, then the social choice problem, that is, the problem of aggregating their observations, is one of statistical inference. This study develops a statistical methodology that can be used to evaluate the properties of...

We approach the social choice problem as one of optimal statistical inference. If individual voters or judges observe the true order ona set of alternatives with error, then it is possible to use the set of individual rankings to make probability statements about the correct social order. Given...

We scrutinize and compare, from the perspective of modern theory of social choice, two rules that have been used to rank competitors in Figure Skating for the past decades. The firs rule has been in use at least from 1982 until 1998, when it was replaced by a new one. We also compare these two...

Some researchers have addressed the problem of aggregating individual preferences or rankings by seeking a ranking that is closest to the individual rankings. Their methods differ according to the notion of distance that they use. The best known method of this sort is due to Kemeny. The first...

This paper compares the poverty reduction impact of income sources, taxes and transfers across five OECD countries. Since the estimation of that impact can depend on the order in which the various income sources are introduced into the analysis, it is done by using the Shapley value. Estimates...

Decomposing inequality indices across household groups or income sources is useful in estimating the contribution of each component to total inequality. This can help policy makers draw efficient policies to reduce disparities in the distribution of incomes using targeting tools. Decomposing...

We study third-degree price discrimination in the presence of uninformed buyers who extract noisy information from observing prices. In a noisy learning environment, price discrimination can be detrimental to the firm and beneficial to the consumers. On the one hand, discriminatory pricing...

We study the issue of integrating real and financial decisions in a monopoly firm with risk-averse decision-makers. To that end, we combine the decisions of the firm and of the shareholders in a very simple but robust model, with uncertainty in the real market and CARA preferences. We show the...