Persistent budget deficits are commonly blamed on irresponsible governments. However, even if the government is fiscally responsible, the agents in charge of implementing the budget may be less concerned about fiscal discipline. According to the survey data analyzed in this paper, such conflicts...

Governments perpetually align their policies to satisfy shifts in voters' relative demand for economic growth versus social equality. Following such shifts, increases (decreases) in government interventions lower (raise) both inequality and growth. This mechanism generates a positive co-movement...

A contingent valuation method is applied to study subjects' willingness to pay for originals when illegal copies are freely available. The subjects consisted of 234 Swedish undergraduate students from the "computer generation". Only 2% of the "normal" (and 0% of the "elite") students were...

This paper investigates an allocation rule that fairly assigns at most one indivisible object and a monetary compensation to each agent, under the restriction that the monetary compensations do not exceed some exogenously given upper bound. A few properties of this allocation rule are stated and...

This paper establishes reserve price as an ethical necessity contrary to its popular interpretation as an instrument of revenue generation. It provides an axiomatic justification to reserve pricing at Vickrey auction in single as well as multiple objects settings. It also provides a multi-object...

In many real-life house allocation problems, rents are bounded from above by price ceilings imposed by a government or a local administration. This is known as rent control. Because some price equilibria may be disqualified given such restrictions, this paper proposes an alternative equilibrium...

We consider envy-free and budget-balanced allocation rules for problems where a number of indivisible objects and a fixed amount of money is allocated among a group of agents. In "small" economies, we identify under classical preferences each agent's maximal gain from manipulation. Using this...

This paper analyses the problem of aggregating judgments over multiple interconnected issues. We enrich the model by introducing the private information underlying individuals’ judgments. Individuals share a common preference for reaching true collective judgments, but hold private information...

This paper studies an allocation problem with multiple assignments, indivisible objects, no endowments and no monetary transfers, where a single object may be assigned to several agents as long as the set of agents assigned the object satisfy a compatibility constraint. It is shown that, on the...