Why would any group want to have a decision-making body composed of representatives? The best answer is found in the "Anti-Federalist ideal" identified by Wood [1992]: if within-group benefits are highly correlated, a legislature composed of randomly chosen representatives that maximized its own...

Child care and housing programs in the United States are marked by quality homogeneity, restricted eligibility, rationing, and copayments that increase as recipients' income rises. Why? I show that these programs can best be explained as attempts to reduce the child care or housing 'poverty...

Decisionmakers who confront a long sequence of criminal opportunities act differently from those who confront a single opportunity. If the sequence is long enough, people will take big chances in return for very small gains, even if the probability of detection is very great and the scale of...

We survey the literature on index crime, paying particular attention to spatial issues. We note the contrasting descriptive traditions of Lombroso (characteristics matter) and Beccaria (incentives matter); and the contrasting policy traditions of incapacitation (predict who will offend and keep...

The past century and a quarter has seen frequent improvements in track and field records. We attempt to estimate what proportion of the speed of record breaking is due to globalization (competitors from more countries) and what proportion is due to technological progress (better equipment and...

If there are no restrictions on the extent to which government plans can be made contingent, then there is some Paretian government with an optimal plan that never reaches a node at which deviation from the plan would yield a Pareto improvement. (At unreached nodes deviations from the optimal...

We give rigorous game-theoretic meaning to the Stackelberg notions of time inconsistency and to the idea of commitment being of value (or sequential irrationality). Time inconsistency treats desirable deviations only along the path, whereas sequential irrationality treats deviations everywhere...

The paper formalizes several of the ideas about commitment set out by Thomas Schelling in 'The Strategy of Conflict'. Using a game-theoretic framework we formalize and interpret 'promise' and 'threat' as different species of commitment. We also distinguish the 'pure promise', the 'pure threat',...

The paper offers a game-theoretic framework for discussing commitment and time consistency. We show when a commitment (or just the appearance of one) is valuable, how valiable it is, and whether the commitment is time consistent. We formulate restrictions on the set of eligible commitments....