Sometimes the leaders of ethnic minority groups behave in a way that may promote xenophobia. A simple two-subject model is used to find out when this behaviour is rational. The conditions are briefly discussed with reference to the Italian case. An appendix illustrates the definition of...

The experiment presented in this paper has two aims, both methodological. First, we want to check for the role of what we may call (after Carpenter et al., 2006) the they came to play effect. Second, we want to test whether the lab outcomes are confirmed by a questionnaire on a hypothetical...

It is argued that the propensity to cooperate may be negatively affected by competition. Experimental evidence support this hypothesis. In a set of three experiments in which different degrees of competition characterize the markets, participants reduce their contributions to a public project as...

The paper illustrates a simple empirical rule to choose the best electoral system for a Parliament.

This paper illustrates ALEX4.1, the 2007 version of the program of simulation of electoral systems developed at ALEX, the Laboratory for Experimental and Simulative Economics of the Università del Piemonte Orientale at Alessandria, Italy. The main features of the program have been...

La ricerca si propone di verificare l'universalità dei risultati (e quindi della teoria che li suffraga) di un piccolo ma altamente considerato corpus sperimentale, in base al quale l'erogazione dello sforzo lavorativo e' influenzata negativamente dall'imposizione fiscale. Tale...

The paper describes a simulation program for comparing electoral systems. The user fixes some basic features, like the distribution of first preferences, their peakedness, the dimension of the districts, and so on. The program produces the resulting Parliament under a number of electoral system,...

The paper describes a weighted-voting system for the election of a Parliament. The system is easy to implement, and it dominates plurality, where "dominates" means that it performs better with reference to both representativeness and stability. The system has some other nice properties,namely...

What do indices of disproportionality actually measure? They provide an aggregate estimation of the difference between votes cast and seats assignment, but the relation between the value of the indices and the will of the voters is highly questionable. The reason is that when casting the vote...