This article explores four questions. First, what theoretical frameworks help describe policy failure and success? Second, how might the decision that leads to failure or success be understood in terms of differing concepts of rationality and decisionmaking? Third, how does the discussion of...

Several recent studies find that interventions in schools can have important lasting consequences for students, and that schools differ in their contribution to students’ learning. However, there is less research investigating how these differences between schools influence longer-term...

Climate change is likely to trigger abrupt and potentially persistent changes in the structure and function of marine ecosystems. Such ‘regime shifts' threaten the livelihoods of millions of people reliant on small-scale fisheries. Yet, it is largely unknown how resource users cope with regime...

The paper examines the problem of aggregating infinite utility streams with a social welfare function which respects the Anonymity and Weak Pareto Axioms. It provides a complete characterization of domains (of the one period utilities) on which such an aggregation is possible. A social welfare...

This paper investigates the nature of paths in the standard neoclassical aggregative model of economic growth that are maximal according to the Suppes-Sen grading principle. This is accomplished by relating such paths to paths which are utilitarian maximal when an increasing (but not necessarily...

The traditional model of sequential decision making, for instance, in extensive form games, is a tree. Most texts define a tree as a connected directed graph without loops and a distinguished node, called the root. But an abstract graph is not a domain for decision theory. Decision theory...

While most papers on team decision-making find that teams behave more selfishly, less trustingly and less altruistically than individuals, Cason and Mui (1997) report that teams are more altruistic than individuals in a dictator game. Using a within-subjects design we re-examine group...

A group of agents wants to reform the status quo if and only if this is Pareto improving. Agents have private information and may have common or private objectives, which creates a tension between information aggregation and minority protection. We analyze a simple voting system - majority rule...

In this paper I develop a simple dynamic agency model postulating that, among budgetary institutions, transparency of the budgeting process is the main driving force in explaining differences in fiscal outcomes and that budgetary numeric rules can be an active long-run constraint only if the...

La toma de decisiones es, por su impacto económico, social, motivacional y hasta simbólico, una actividad administrativa de extraordinaria importancia. Esta importancia es muy clara cuando tratamos con decisiones estratégicas, como la inversión en una nueva planta o la expansión de la...