We consider a two period model in which an incumbent political party chooses the level of a current policy variable unilaterally, but faces competition from a political opponent in the future. Both parties care about voters' payoffs, but they have different beliefs about how policy choices will...

We consider the problem of finding sufficient conditions for political support of liberal, growth-enhancing policy in a quality-ladders model with heterogeneous agents differing in their endowment of wealth and skills. The policy set is two-dimensional: Agents vote for the level of...

I investigate the link between business regulatory reforms and economic growth in 172 countries. I create a five year dataset on business regulatory reforms from the World Bank's Doing Business reports. Then, I test the hypothesis that business regulatory reforms increase economic growth, using...

The financial and economic crisis entails the question of a return to organized societal regulation. After 30 years during which public authority occupied a marginal position, the financial world is begging for a return to some order. Thus, the question to be asked is that of the legitimate...

A well-known model in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors who are able to affect the behavior of their followers. Hence, opinion leaders have some power over their followers, and they can exercise this power by influencing their followers choice of...

One year after the publication of Arrow's 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values, Guilbaud (1912-2006) published in Économie Appliquée a 50 page's paper entitled Les théories de l'intérêt général et le problème logique de l'agrégation. In this paper -unfortunately too little...

We describe a simple computing technique for the tournament choice problem. It rests upon a relational modeling and uses the BDD-based computer system RelView for the evaluation of the relation-algebraic expressions that specify the solutions and for the visualization of the computed results....

We analyze the aggregation problem without the assumption that individuals and society have fully determined and observable preferences. More precisely, we endow individuals ans society with sets of possible von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions over lotteries. We generalize the classical...

Harsanyi's axiomatic justification of utilitarianism is extended to a framework with subjective and heterogenous priors. Contrary to the existing literature on aggregation of preferences under uncertainty, society is here allowed to formulate probability judgements, not on the actual state of...

We provide a generalization of Harsanyi (1955)'s aggregation theorem to the case of incomplete preferences at the individual and social level. Individuals and society have possibly incomplete expected utility preferences that are represented by sets of expected utility functions. Under Pareto...