According to commonsense wisdom, under proportionality a small centrist party enjoys an excess of power with reference to its share of seats (or votes) due to the possibility of blackmailing the larger ones. This hypothesis has been challenged on a theoretical ground, with some empirical...

In this work we use data on response times from a public good experiment to test the hypothesis that cooperation is instinctive, under the assumption that the longer the time of the decision, the less instinctive the choice. Results seem to support the hypothesis that cooperation is instinctive,...

Our experiment aims at studying the impact of two types of relational goods on the voluntary contributions to the production of a public good, i.e. acquaintance among the contributors and having performed a common work before the experiment. We implement two treatments with 128 participants from...

Each reform implies social and economic changes. After experiencing war and reunification, today Vietnam is implementing a comprehensive and deep process of renovation (doi moi), but a revolution needs the support of the population to be successful. This paper investigates whether the Vietnamese...

The rising star of scholarly publishing is Open Access. Even some traditional journals now offer this option on author payment, and many full freely accessible journals are now available to scholars, providing relief to research institutions increasingly unable to afford the escalating...

This paper studies how individual religiosity affects people's behaviour. In particular here I study the behaviour of the second players in a standard trust game. They have the possibility of sharing some resources between themselves and their game mates. It results that more religious people...

This paper compares individual preferences for a market economy in Western and Eastern Europe over more than one decade, since the fall of Berlin Wall. The aim is to understand whether preferences in the two blocks have converged towards the current orientation of the EU's economic policy: a...

The link between individual religiosity and happiness has been studied with respect to different aspects. The general conclusion is that religiosity helps people to feel happier. However the extant studies have never taken into account how belonging to a discriminated religious group in a tense...

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...

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...