The use of coarse categories is prevalent in various situations and has been linked to biased economic outcomes, ranging from discrimination against minorities to empirical anomalies in financial markets. In this paper we study economic rationales for categorizing coarsely. We think of the way...

In a country with weak institutional constraints on the executive, the real power might belong to the government bureaucracy rather than to an autocratic leader. We combine the Aghion-Tirole definition of formal and real authority with the Barro-Ferejohn model of political agency to study the...

This paper proposes a model of attention allocation in decision-making. Attention has various definitions across the literature. Here, I understand attention as selecting information for costly processing. The paper investigates how an agent rationally allocates attention. The resulting...

This paper tries to explore the mechanism of the choices of Open Source Software (OSS) Licenses. The benignant licensor choose between the restrictive and permissive licenses by considering how the commercial contributor reacts to the choice of OSS licenses to make the OSS project best supported...

The focus of this paper is on the use of staff policy recommendations in central banks. Based on the responses to a recent survey conducted by the Bank of International Settlements, the paper tries to answer two questions. (1) How (to what extent) do central bank decision-makers make use of...

Decision making in the WTO has become ever more difficult as the number of members increases and the range of issues tackled broadens. This paper looks at reasons why aspects of decision-making might be changed and discusses a number of potential pitfalls that change would have to avoid, such as...

The ever greater role given to public participation by laws and regulations, in particular in the field of environmental management calls for new operational methods and tools for managers and practitioners. This paper analyses the potentials and the critical limitations of current approaches in...

In this paper, we illustrate how surveys can be used to elicit the preferences of the public and of policymakers and city officials for regeneration projects at urban sites. Our methodology uses rating exercises, coupled with conjoint-choice stated preferences for the general public and with...

This article introduces a model of productive leadership structures. It is based on the idea that structures should stimulate dialectical processes which activate functional and simultaneously restrict dysfunctional behavioural tendencies of the management team. The structural dialectics are...