How do individuals shape societies? How do societies shape individuals? This paper develops a framework for studying the connections between micro and macro phenomena. The framework builds on two ingredients widely used in social science - population and variable. Starting with the simplest case...

This paper proposes a new model of wage determination and wage inequality. In this model, wage-setters set workers' wages; they do so either directly, as when individuals vote in a salary committee, or indirectly, as when political parties, via the myriad of social, economic, fiscal, and other...

This paper studies the inequality in the distribution of social interaction profiles among individuals. An interaction profile assigns the probabilities that one individual has to interact with well defined social groups and it can be inferred, for instance, from observations of social ties...

This paper explores one option for the development of a theoretical approach to economic decision-making that goes beyond the mechanical-mathematical models based on the assumptions of rational self-interest and utility maximization. The proposed model incorporates facts, values, relationships,...

This paper argues that the Kyoto Protocol to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change was doomed to face difficulties ab initio. It explains why this is the case by analyzing the Kyoto Protocol’s shortcomings and deficiencies. Moving the climate change agenda forward multilaterally...

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...

This paper develops the mathematical foundations of comparison, referential, and relative (CRR) processes. The key ingredients are: (1) three kinds of terms; and (2) two kinds of relations. Combining the three terms - absolute amount, relative amount, and relative rank - with the two kinds of...

We study the problem of how to allocate a set of indivisible objects like jobs or houses and an amount of money among a group of people as fairly and as efficiently as possible. A particular constraint for such an allocation is that every person should be assigned with the same number of objects...

This paper studies the problem of how to distribute a set of indivisible objects with an amount M of money among a number of agents in a fair way. We allow any number of agents and objects. Objects can be desirable or undesirable and the amount of money can be negative as well. In case M is...