This paper is about a model of uncertainty in voting that allows for a schedule of people`s preferences for one party over another, that gives rise to a chance of casting a pivotal vote which is small but not, as often supposed, infinitesimal, that is not inconsistent with evidence about the...

1) Bargaining Unexplained, page 2 2) Bargaining Assumptions in the Study of Politics, Law and War, page 27 3) Bargaining and Voting, page 49

A common, though by no means universally-accepted doctrine among practitioners of law and economics is that redistribution is no business of the law. This efficiency-only doctrine is not that redistribution is unworthy as a social objective, but that any given benefit to the poor is attainable...

Patents raise the price and reduce consumption of the patented good, but the resulting deadweight loss is thought to be worth bearing when patent protection is required as an incentive to invention. The newly-invented good generates a residual surplus, making people better off than they would be...

Economists do not understand how bargains are struck. A bargain is the sharing of a pie between two or more people who are collectively entitled to the pie but cannot appropriate it until they agree how large each person's slice is to be. We know that people do strike bargains and that civilized...

An ideal planner would follow the original Samuelson rule: to undertake each and every public project, program or activity up to the point where the sum of its marginal benefits is just equal to its marginal cost. Actual governments modify the rule in response to the marginal cost of public...

A reasonable and fair interpretation of the mandate for equalization payments in Section 36(2) of the Canadian Constitution differs from the present equalization formula in these respects: Transfers to the poorer provinces would be financed by transfers from the richer provinces rather than from...

Citizen-candidate models of representative government postulate that any citizen may become a candidate for office, that a winner is chosen from among the candidates by voting with ties broken by the flip of a coin, that all voters have preferences among a set of policies and that the...

It has been observed by many that Jorgenson and Griliches' findings have profound implications about the nature and prospects of economic development. In this paper, the author proposes to show that Jorgenson and Griliches' evidence does not bear these implications, and that the inferences drawn...

A duty to vote may be interpreted narrowly as no more than an obligation to cast one’s ballot, supporting a party or candidate in one’s own interest exclusively or, if one so pleases, with some regard for the community as a whole. Alternatively, a duty to vote may be interpreted...