We consider abstract social systems of private property, made of n individuals endowed with non-paternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact through exchanges on competitive markets and Pareto-efficient lumpsum transfers. The transfers follow from a distributive liberal social contract...

In a framework of preferences over lotteries, we show that an axiom system consisting of weakened versions of Arrow's axioms has a unique solution. "Relative Utilitarianism" consists of first normalising individual von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities between 0 and 1 and then summing them. This...

We provide a characterization of selection correspondences in two-person exchange economies that can be core rationalized in the sens that there exists a preference profil with some standard properties that generates the observed choices as the set core elements of the economy for any given...

The notion of "social capital" was first introduced by the sociologist James Coleman in 1988. He defined it as "the ability of people to work togather for common purposes in groups and organizations". It is argued that a group with members that trust each other can accomplish more economic groth...

In this comment we compare the asset-based approach of Bowles and Gintis with the alternative approach associated most closely with social democracy but followed in all advanced industrial societies to some extent.

This paper examines the Olsonian thesis that group is size inversely related to successful collective action. We start with an empirical analysis based on primary data. This data gives information on a set of 21 villages in the Indian Himalayas that collectively monitor to protect and conserve...

Given the choice sets produced by a pair of Condorcet social choice correspondence, the following intersting questions arise. Does one of these sets always contain the other? If not, do they always interest or on the contrary can they have an empty intersection? Laffond, Laslier and Le Breton...

The purpose of this paper is to report on experiments that test for an independent effect of bicameralism on legislative stability. The experiments are designed to test the theory of the bicameral core (Hammond and Miller 1986), which demonstrates that a bicameral legislature is more apt to have...

In this paper, we introduce the notion of a linked domain and prove that a non-manipulable social choice function defined on such a domain must be dictatorial.

The contribution is to analyze why harmful lobbyism against the transition to market economy takes place and to recommand how this important barrier to economic growth can be eliminated.