One of the newer suggestions for the design of public economic units refers to Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions (FOCJs), which are instruments to shape cooperation of jurisdictions, e.g. municipalities.The study clarifies important types of FOCJ. It concentrates on FOCJs where the...

One might obtain special favor or avoid disfavor by winning a competitive contest, a socially wasteful process that has been studied extensively in the rent-seeking literature. But favor or disfavor might also be uncontestable. In that case it will be efficient along some dimensions but grossly...

Cooperative behavior as well as other cultural rules and values are made explicit in organizational units that procure and provide a common service. The common service is procured by a club, which consists of a user-value function, a representation governance, and a budgetallocation function....

Nuclear meltdown in Japan and civil society strife across the Middle East highlight the degree to which resilience is core to international peace and security. This article considers the means by which communities can become increasingly resilient through shared best practices across a range of...

Secession of Southern Sudan is a de facto situation which has to be dealt with wisdom to avoid future clashed that may escalate. Additionally, the mutual use of resources is inevitable for both sides. The tribal structure in both South and North necessitate establishing new code of dealing with...

We consider the optimal choice set of candidates standing for elected office. The decision dimensions are in the number of candidates standing for election, and the experiential base of the candidates standing for election as measured by the length of prior experience held by the candidates and...

The recent financial crisis has provoked a raft of contending claims as to whether the cause of the crisis is better attributed to market failure or political failure. Such claims are predicated on a presumption that markets and polities are meaningfully separate entities. To the contrary, we...

The World Economic Forum recognizes that while restrictions on energy affect water systems and vise versa, energy and water policy are rarely coordinated. The International Panel on Climate Change predicts that wet places will become wetter and dry places will become dryer. Transboundary water,...

Why do elected officials often suffer from political paralysis and fail to implement the best policies available? This paper considers a new yet intuitive explanation that focuses on the quality of the politicians competing to replace the incumbent. The key insight is that a `good' incumbent...

This paper analyzes inter- and intraregional redistribution in a centralized state using the citizen-candidate model. It focuses on conflicting interests among regions and among citizens of varying mobility. If discrimination with respect to place of residence and degree of mobility is possible,...