Whereas much literature exists on “choice overload,” little is known about effects of numbers of alternatives in donation decisions. How do these affect both the size and distribution of donations? We hypothesize that donations are affected by the reputation of recipients and increase with...

What are the best voting systems in terms of utilitarianism? Or in terms of maximin, or maximax? We study these questions for the case of three alternatives and a class of structurally equivalent voting rules. We show that plurality, arguably the most widely used voting system, performs very...

We offer complete characterizations of the equilibrium outcomes of two prominent agenda voting institutions that are widely used in the democratic world: the amendment, also known as the Anglo-American procedure, and the successive, or equivalently the Euro-Latin procedure. Our axiomatic...

The origins of electoral systems have received scant attention in the literature. Looking at the history of electoral rules in the advanced world in the last century, this paper shows that the existing wide variation in electoral rules across nations can be traced to the strategic decisions that...

Electoral institutions that encourage citizens to vote are widely used around the world. Yet little is known about the effects of such institutions on voter participation and the composition of the electorate. In this paper, I combine a field experiment with a change in Peruvian voting laws to...

Through an experiment, we investigate how the level of rationality relates to concerns for equality and efficiency. Subjects perform dictator games and a guessing game. More rational subjects are not more frequently of the selfregarding type. When performing a comparison within the same degree...

Some current utility models presume that people are concerned with their relative standing in a reference group. If this is true, do certain types care more about this than others? Using simple binary decisions and self-reported happiness, we investigate both the prevalence of ``difference...

In this paper we address the importance of distributive effects in the social valuation of QALY's. We propose a social welfare function that generalises the functions traditionally used in the health economic literature. The novelty is that, depending on the individual health gains, our function...

This paper shows how recently developed regression-based methods for the decomposition of health inequality can be extended to incorporate heterogeneity in the responses of health to the explanatory variables. We illustrate our method with an application to the GHQ measure of psychological...

Climate science indicates that climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare or utility index emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We construct and calibrate a multigenerational model with intertemporal links...