The quality of publications, approximated by the containing journal's quality indicator, is often the basis for hire and promotion in academic and research positions. Over the years a handful of ranking methods have been proposed. Discussing the most prominent methods we show that they are...

To take development and budgeting decisions for research activi- ties the officials in charge need to constantly evaluate and assess the quality of research. Over the years a handful of scoring methods for academic journals have been proposed. Discussing the most prominent methods (de facto...

A ranking of journals is manipulable if a particular journal's position can be improved by making additional citations to other journals. We introduce a simple ranking method that is not not manipulable and is invariant to citation intensities, journal scaling and article-splitting. The ranking...

Power indices have been used to evaluate the allocation of power in a wide range of voting situations. While they use the language of game theory known measures of a priori voting power are hardly more than statistical expectations assuming the random behaviour of the players. We introduce a...

In this paper we analyze the consequences of the fairness recommendation of the Venice Commission in allocating voting districts among larger administrative regions. This recommendation requires the size of any constituency not to differ from the average constituency size by more than a fixed...

One of the aims of the new electoral law of Hungary has been to define a fairer apportionment into voting districts. This is ensured by a set of rules slightly more premissive than those laid out in the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters of the Venice Commission. These rules fix the...

Few elections attract so much attention as the Papal Conclave that elects the religious leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide. The Conclave is an interesting case of qualied majority voting with many participants and no formal voting blocks. Each cardinal is a well-known public figure...

The evaluation of scientific output has a key role in the allocation of research funds and academic positions. Decisions are often based on quality indicators for academic journals and over the years a handful of scoring methods have been proposed for this purpose. Discussing the most prominent...

We study coalitional games where the coalitional payoffs depend on the entire coalition structure. We introduce a noncooperative, sequential coalition formation model and show that the set of equilibrium outcomes coincides with the recursive core, a generalisation of the core to such games. In...

The sequential coalition formation model of Bloch (1996) to solve cooperative games with externalities exhibits some anomalies when related to classical concepts. We elaborate on these problems, define a modification of Bloch's model and show that its order-independent equilibria coincide with...