While America is preparing again for an important shift in policy-making, how would its Leaders read the map in the Arab-Islamic world? That's our concern here...The dramatic global resurgence of religious, often fundamentalist, movements over the last decades has caught many people by surprise....

The paper provides a review of features of restructuring strategies, indicating that distress may limit the choice available. It then introduces the decision theory to show that the final choice may be influenced by objective criteria and by subjective or non-rational criteria as well as by...

Prior research on quot;strategic votingquot; has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous,...

Prior research on quot;strategic votingquot; has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous,...

I study how to allocate control (over one or multiple projects) when people may openly disagree on the optimal course of action.I first show that, in the efficient allocation, complementary decisions should be decided by the same person, while substitute decisions should be decided by different...

The design of fully funded pension plans is affected by governance and incentive problems, as underlined by the experience of several countries. The analytic perspective of contract theory allows to detect the nature of such problems: pension-fund managers have strong incentives to manipulate...

Averaging estimates is an effective way to improve accuracy when combining expert judgments, integrating group members' judgments, or using advice to modify personal judgments. If the estimates of two judges ever fall on different sides of the truth, which we term bracketing, averaging must...

This paper compares and contrasts two schools of political economy: the Austrian School, prominent members of which include Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; and the Bloomington School, which was founded by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It is argued that the two traditions share a good deal in...

This paper analyses the decision-making processes of heterogeneous agents, when both individual preferences and group actions are taken into account. Under the assumptions of certain topologies of interactions and assuming cognitive and informational restrictions, an agent-based model is...

The current paper connects anxiety about disease contamination to that about cultural contamination and the exclusionary behavior toward ethnic outgroups that it incites. We suggest that when individuals are exposed to disease fears, an epistemic groundwork is laid for construing outgroups as...