A voting protocol is said to be strongly participatory if for any player i and any strategy profile either the outcome is i‘s preferred one or has a strategy which would ensure her a better outcome, and VNMstrategy proof if at any preference profile the set of sincere strategies of each player...

We study party formation in a general model of collective decision-making, modelling parties as agglomerations of policy positions championed by decision-makers. We show that in the presence of economies of party size and a one-dimensional policy space, players agglomerate into exactly two...

We consider the classical prisoner's dilemma being played repeatedly on a dynamic network, where agents may choose their actions as well as their co-players. Agents act profit-maximizing, fully rationally and base their decision only on local information. Individual decisions are made such that...

James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. Boston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning...

We study the behavior of rules for the adjudication of con°icting claims when there are a large number of claimants with small claims. We model such situations by replicating some basic problem. We show that under replication, the random arrival rule (O'Neill, 1982) behaves like the...

Policymakers often propose strict enforcement strategies to fight the shadow economy and to increase tax morale. However, there is also a bottom-up approach such as, for example, decentralizing the political power to those who are close to the problems. Thus, this paper analyses the relationship...

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. Rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using panel data covering more than 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition to security measures, are shown to significantly reduce...

In the economic literature various political institutions designed to control the government have been analyzed. However, an important institution has been neglected so far: independent auditing institutions with an extended mandate to analyze the budget draft and individual policy proposals. We...

A social policy is a rule which assigns each possible set of endowments an allocation of these endowments among members of society. This paper assumes that individuals have preferences over private consumption and preferences over all possible social policies.

We illustrate by means of a dynamic research and development race that, while at some points in the race, social incentives and private incentives may coincide, at other points they may diverge-- too many researchers remain that race.