The paper illustrates the results of some experiments aiming to test the effect of taxation on the effort. Differently from previous experiments (Levy-Garboua et al., Sutter and Weck-Hannemann, Swenson), in our research the revenue of taxation is not depleted but employed, more realistically, to...

Commonsense wisdom claims that majoritarian parliaments produce more efficient governments than proportional ones, because there are less decisors involved. Empirical evidence gives poor support to this claim. A possible explanation is that the real decisors may be not the parties, but the...

It is suggested that it is possible to enhance employment through a large reduction of the cost of newly hired workers, with no changes in net wage. If the unemployment is high, this policy is almost surely efficient, but for minor caveats. 400 italian entrepreneurs where asked to assess the...

The paper presents the results of some simulations of the effect of the invasion of non-cooperating subjects into a community adopting a cooperative convention. The convention is described by an indefinitely repeated prisoner-dilemma game. We check the effects on the robustness of the...

The issue of power plays a relevant role in evaluating the representativeness of a Parliament. In this paper a new governability index is introduced, taking inspiration from the propensity to disruption and referring to the power of the parties.

The so-called problem of the spontaneous cooperation has been substantially resolved through a mix of biology and economics. All the elements of the solution had been discovered by 1980s, yet they went somehow unnoticed. This "old" solution is the subject of this review. Its most relevant...

The paper is devoted to the assessment of the relevance of the they-come-to-play effect (CTPE, defined in the text). It employs both a real-effort setting and a questionnaire. The effect proves to be significant, albeit the results cannot be generalized straightforwardly. From the comparison...

This paper deals with what we believe is an important component of human well being, which has been traditionally neglected by economic discourse: the individual’s perception of his/her life’s overall security. Our aim is to study this feature within the framework of the economics...

he paper describes a program for comparing electoral systems based on the simulation of the preferences of the voters. The parameters requested (distribution of first preferences, district magnitude, etc) are set up by the user. The program produces the resulting Parliament under a number of...