Levine and Palfrey's QRE account of turnout in large elections raises the broader question of how much of a departure from standard rational choice theory is justified by the considerable repertoire of rational choice anomalies that has accumulated since Downs and Olson half a century ago. An...

A voter only alters the outcome of an election if her/his vote is pivotal. A leading innovation of recent years in game theory applied to politics is Austen-Smith and Banks' analysis of pivotal voting, yielding a special form of strategic voting such that rational voters would vote against the...

A leading recent line of work in game theory applied to politics exploits the "pivotal voting" insight introduced by Austen-Smith and Banks [1]. The most prominent follow-on papers have been by Feddersen and Pesendorfer [2, 3, 4, 5], where a particularly striking result is that in a large...

This is the Introduction to a forthcoming book (McGraw-Hill, January 2002) on the origin of the Scientific Revolution. It includes a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book.

This is an invited comment on a forthcoming target article (Rachlin, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press) which provides a further entry in the long list of proposals for reducing what might be seen as social motivation to some roundabout form of self-interest. But his argument exhibits the...

This draft material gives an account of the "S-diagram", which uses Schelling's social choice diagram in the context of my NSNX ("neither selfish nor exploited") model of individual choice to provide an account of social equilibrium in situations in which social outcomes are contested. Examples...

The paper considers some aspects of rival beliefs in religion as against rival beliefs in science. This can easily account for why tolerance is far more characteristic of science, but leaves some question about the extreme zeal that has often marked religious rivalry. One essential aspect seems...

Two very strange results from variants of the much-studied Wason selection task point to an interpretation which has substantial implications for important choices in the world. (Prepared for AIBS conference on behavioral economics, Great Barrington MA, 2002)

The paper describes three novel regularities in public choice games, tied to a Darwinian argument about rules that could be expected to govern social choice. Note: This is a revised version of this paper, originally titled "Two Tests For ‘NSNX’ Effects In Cooperation Experiments," and...

This account of the well-known Monty Hall puzzle is designed to provide a sharp focus on just how the illusory intuition arises by excluding various frequently-suggested possibilities.