We present a straightforward proof of Arrow's Theorem. Our approach avoids some of the complexities of existing proofs and is meant to be transparent and easily followed.

Social contract theory is incoherent and it does not work as desired. Among the most obvious disanalogies is that contracts are enforced by a third party, commonly the state. There is no such external enforcer for a constitution. Contractarian theorists typically ignore all such issues and use...

The article focuses on the justification provided by classical contract theory for the right of states to enact laws and the corresponding obligation of political allegiance. At first the distinction between political authority and parental authority developed by John Locke in his seminal work...

This paper studies how society votes on the payroll taxes of a basic income and a social health insurance scheme. Individuals differ along the two most important dimensions when it comes to the design of the two welfare schemes, namely, income and risk. Even though the introduction of a basic...

This article provides an introduction to the use of social welfare functions for the comparative evaluation of social alternatives. Three main approaches are considered: Bergson–Samuelson social welfare functions, Arrovian social welfare functions, and Sen's social welfare functionals....

The point of departure of this paper is that players in a contest may have mixed motives. On one hand, players have the interest of winning the contest and taking the prize. On the other hand, they could be better off taking part in a contest which implies some cooperative behaviour. This paper...

This paper explores the introduction of a variable critical-level in a variable population context. We focus the attention on the Critical- Level Leximin criterion, a social evaluation procedure which compares two social states as follows: (i) It reproduces the Leximin criterion when applied to...

Many procedures have been suggested for the venerable problem of dividing a set of indivisible items between two players. We propose a new algorithm (AL), related to one proposed by Brams and Taylor (BT), which requires only that the players strictly rank items from best to worst. Unlike BT, in...

The note documents and discusses the modalities and consequences of the phenomenon of siphoning profits of state enterprises for private uses by state enteprise managers and insiders in Bulgaria during the period of early transition.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the different levels of tax rates on the use of the labour force in a range of OECD countries, using the methodology of effective marginal tax rates. Results for the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Japan, the United...