In this paper, we consider the problem that a benevolent designer wants to provide a non-excludable public good with a fixed cost to agents with privately known valuations. Adopting utilitarian's point of view, the designer maximizes the ex-ante total utility of all agents. The impossibility...

In a recent paper, Sprumont (1991) showed that the uniform rule (Benassy, 1982) on the single-peaked domain (Black, 1948) is the only rule that satisfies strategy-proofness, anonymity, and efficiency. This result motivates us to investigate whether there is a larger domain on which there exists...

We outline a new voting procedure for representative democracies. This procedure should be used for important decisions only and consists of two voting rounds: a randomly-selected subset of the citizens is awarded a one-time voting right. The parliament also votes, and the two decisions are...

The Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) used by the Council of the European Union developed to a high degree of complexity from one modifying treaty to another, until the latest definition stipulated in the Treaty of Lisbon. This paper analyses this EU intra-institutional voting method using a...

We analyze and evaluate the different decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to date. Most of the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue in favor of the nucleolus as...

We propose a new voting system, satisfaction approval voting (SAV), for multiwinner elections, in which voters can approve of as many candidates or as many parties as they like. However, the winners are not those who receive the most votes, as under approval voting (AV), but those who maximize...

We find that presidential and congressional influences affect the rate of disaster declaration and the allocation of FEMA disaster expenditures across states. States politically important to the president have a higher rate of disaster declaration by the president, and disaster expenditures are...

The creative community within public choice analysis arose out of the establishment of what has become known as the “Virginia School of Political Economy” in the 1960s and 1970s. These efforts were reinforced through the move by Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) to build a department...

We study simple majority rule from a perspective of coalitional decision makings. Four attrative properties each linking decisions by a group to decisions by its various coalitions are introduced, and are used for characterizing simple majority rule. Our characterization result provides an...

The economics literature on mercantilism tends to emphasize gold hoarding and external barriers to trade as defining characteristics. However, medieval institutions included a host of internal barriers to trade as well as external ones. High offices were often for sale as were monopoly...