This paper analyzes the problem that an incumbent faces during the legislature when deciding how to react to popular initiatives or policy proposals coming from different sources. We argue that this potential source of electoral disadvantage that the incumbent obtains after being elected can...

This paper aims to account for varying economic performances and political stability under dictatorship. We argue that economic welfare and social order are the contemporary relevant factors of political regimes' stability. Societies with low natural level of social order tend to tolerate...

We characterize the class of strategy-proof social choice functions on the domain of symmetric single-peaked preferences. This class is strictly larger than the set of generalized median voter schemes (the class of strategy-proof and tops-only social choice functions on the domain of...

We introduce the concept of a paramaterized collection of games with side payments and determine a bound on epsilon so that all sufficiently large games in such a collection have non-emplty epsilon-cores. A parametrized collection of games is described by (a) the number of approximate player...

The purpose of this article is to introduce a Cartesian product structure into the social choice theoretical framework and to examine if new possibility results to Gibbard's and Sen's paradoxes can be developed thanks to it. We believe that a Cartesian product structure is a pertinent way to...

We consider parameterized collections of games without side payments and determine a bound on epsilon so that all sufficiently large games in the collection have non-empty epsilon-cores. The required size of epsilon depends on: (a)the number of approximate player types and the accuracy of this...

We introduce the concept of a parameterized collection of games with limited side payments, ruling out large transfers of utility. Under the assumption that the payoff set of the grand coalition is convex, we show that a large game with limited side payments has a non-empty epsilon-core. Our...

The art of rhetoric may be defined as changing other people's minds (opinions, beliefs) without providing them new information. One tech- nique heavily used by rhetoric employs analogies. Using analogies, one may draw the listener's attention to similarities between cases and to re-organize...

We consider social choice problems where a society must choose a subset from a set of objects. Specifically, we characterize the families of strategy-proof voting procedures when not all possible subsets of objects are feasible, and voters' preferences are separable or additively representable.

This paper surveys the literature on strategy-proofness from a historical perspective. While I discuss the connections with other works on incentives in mechanism design, the main emphasis is on social choice models. This article has been prepared for the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare,...