In this paper we analyze the consequences of the fairness recommendation of the Venice Commission in allocating voting districts among larger administrative regions. This recommendation requires the size of any constituency not to differ from the average constituency size by more than a fixed...

Franchising is a contract that is not always balanced. This is due to a relationship where one can find a party, usually the franchisor, dominating the contractual bond. The economic and legal relationships call for much more attention due to the massive investments involved. One will often...

To date, a series of non-traditional schemes have proliferated in the area of tax law, challenging the widely accepted principles of tax legislation. Lump-sum or presumptive taxes, redemption fees or tax amnesty, corrective taxes (bank levies), or confiscatory taxes (e.g., banker bonuses) can...

Agents involved in a conflicting claims problem may be concerned with the proportion of their claims that is satisfied, or with the total amount they get. In order to relate both perspectives, we associate to each conflicting claims problem a bargaining-in-proportions set. Then, we obtain a...

The Laakso-Taagepera index (Laakso and Taagepera, 1979) has become the most commonly used measure to specify the ‘effective’number of political parties in a party system where parties vary substantially in their vote and/or seat shares. It is well known that the Laakso-Taagepera...

Power indices have been used to evaluate the allocation of power in a wide range of voting situations. While they use the language of game theory known measures of a priori voting power are hardly more than statistical expectations assuming the random behaviour of the players. We introduce a...