There is a secret paradox at the heart of social contract theories. Such theories assume that, because personal security and private property are at risk in a state of nature, subjects will agree to grant Leviathan a monopoly of violence. But what is to prevent Leviathan from turning on his...

We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...

The purpose of this paper is to provide reasonable estimates for the welfare cost of environmental tax reform in the U.S. economy. Unlike most previous studies that empirically evaluate the deadweight cost of taxation, the model employed here considers explicitly the joint allocation of leisure...

This paper is intended as a step toward the development of theoretically founded and operational environmental taxation formula in a second-best world. Recent studies find that environmental taxes typically exacerbate pre-existing tax distortions and, therefore, the optimal pollution tax should...

The paper discusses the relation between experimental economics and the cognitive approach, after having outlined the chief characteristics of the major lines of research in both areas, also with reference to the historical development and to methodological issues. Then the attention is focused...

Artificial life (alife) is the bottom-up study of basic phenomena commonly associated with living agents, such as self- replication, evolution, adaptation, self-organization, exploitation, competition, cooperation, and social network formation. Alife complements the traditional biological and...

Agent-based computational economics (ACE)is the computational study of economies modelled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting agents. This short paper is a brief guide to recent ACE research. For more information, visit the ACE Web site at http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace.htm....

We report experimental results on one-shot two person 3x3 constant sum games played by non-economists without previous experience in the laboratory. Although strategically our games are very similar to previous experiments in which game theory predictions fail dramatically, 80% of actions taken...

This paper proposes a synoptic methodology to evaluate the determinants of audit fees by utilising Neural Networks. First, a brief discussion is presented to highlight the significant application of Neural Network in the areas of financial management; second the framework of proposed methodology...

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do unusual aspects of survey interviews affect these measures? An experiment on a nationally representative sample of over 1200 Americans provides an answer. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of four groups. A control group...