There is broad, though not universal, agreement that widespread voter ignorance and irrational evaluation of evidence are serious threats to democracy. But there is deep disagreement over strategies for mitigating the danger. 'Top-down' approaches, such as epistocracy and lodging more authority...

I use a model of human causal learning, Causal Support (Tenenbaum & Griffiths, 2001), to derive a meaningful measure of Cognitive Distance – the degree to which two people differ in their opinions about the workings of the world. Next, I amend this measure to quantify the notion of Cognitive...

This paper reports on the results of a series of experimental laboratory elections. The novelty of the design allows me to study both coordination failures and coordination efficiency in a repeated-game, divided majority setting. I assess and compare the performance of three voting mechanisms,...

Nicholas Vriend (2002) asked whether F.A. Hayek was an “ace,” and answered affirmatively. By “ace,” Vriend meant someone who worked with agent-based modeling. To be sure, Hayek could not have worked with agent-based models because that platform did not exist when Hayek was developing his...

This chapter examines the role of altruistic motives in the economic analysis of public social transfers, both from a positive and from a normative point of view. The positive question is to know whether we can fully neglect altruistic considerations to explain the development or sustainability...

We study the phenomenon of strategic polarization in group interactions. Agents with private preferences choose a public action (e.g., voice opinions), and the mean of their actions represents the group’s realized outcome. They face a trade-off between influencing the group outcome and...

Standard-setting organizations (SSOs) typically require their members to declare whether they hold standard-essential patents (SEPs) or disclose which SEPs they own, and to commit to licensing SEPs on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND) terms. The apparent vagueness of FRAND...

For more than a century, careful readers of the Green Bag have known that “[t]here is nothing sacred in a theory of law...which has outlived its usefulness or which was radically wrong from the beginning...The question is What is the law and what is the true public policy?” Professor Orin...

I identify subjective state spaces for three structures --- complete and transitive preferences, incomplete dominance relations, and choice functions --- that are given on finite menus. These structures can be modeled together or separately.My results employ some combinatorial techniques and...

Nobody could have known it at the time, but when Rex Stout's novella Justice Ends at Home was published in 1915, it foreshadowed not only the rise of two enduringly popular fictional heroes (Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin), but also the fall of one enduringly objectionable actual villain (Judge...