We analyze individual satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with the personal financial situation for Israeli citizens of Jewish and Arab descent. Our data set is the Israeli Social Survey (2006). We are especially interested in the impact of the religions Judaism, Islam and...

We survey the economics of transboundary river water allocation, which emerged in the 1960s and has matured over the last decade due to increasing concerns over water scarcity and pollution. We outline the major approaches and pay specific attention to the strategic aspects of transboundary...

Power is a core concept in the analysis and design of organisations. In this paper we consider positional power in hierarchies. One of the problems with the extant literature on positional power in hierarchies is that it is mainly restricted to the analysis of power in terms of the bare...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore interest...

Most monetary policy committees decide on interest rates using a simple majority voting rule. Given the inherent heterogeneity of committee members, this voting rule is suboptimal in terms of the quality of the interest rate decision, but popular for other (political) reasons. We show that a...

A committee makes a decision on a project on behalf of the public. Members of the committee agree on the a priori value of the project, and hold additional private information about its consequences. They are experts who care about the value of the project and about being considered well...

We develop a theoretical framework for studying the effects of interaction on the quaJity of decision-making by monetary policy committees. We show that interaction, i.e. increasing one's expertise through an exchange of views, is most likely not to result in interdependent voting...

This paper presents a study on the recently proposed linear inequality representation of Arrovian Social Welfare Functions (ASWFs). We first give an alternative proof of the ASWF integer linear inequality representation theorem, and then show several sufficient conditions on preference domains...

Some committees are made up of experts, persons interested in both the (subject) matter at hand and in coming across as able decision-makers. Such committees would like to conceal disagreement from the public. We present a theory that describes the reaction of experts to the requirement to...

Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a...