The paper analyses changes in European Union decision making that reflects the new philosophy of flexible integration approved by the 1997 Amsterdam summit. It focuses on the EMU protocol on excessive deficit procedure in the Council of Ministers and formulates a new model for a priori estimates...

Children are seldom accounted for in household behavioural models. They are usually assumed to have neither the capacity nor the power to influence the household decision process. The literature on collective models has so far incorporated children through the caring preferences of their parents...

Does the cultural background influence the success with which genetically unrelated individuals cooperate in social dilemma situations? In this paper we provide an answer by analyzing the data of Herrmann et al. (Science 2008, pp. 1362-1367), who study cooperation and punishment in sixteen...

In Italia, la rivelazione di fatti di corruzione ha aperto e acutizzato un conflitto tra politici e magistrati con un alto potenziale di delegittimazione istituzionale. Il ciclo di Mani pulite che ne riassume la vicenda ha attraversato diverse fasi, caratterizzate da variabili coalizioni tra...

This paper examines the effects of changes in information-processing technology on the efficient organizational forms of data-processing in decision-making systems. Data-processing is modelled in the framework of the dynamic parallel processing model of associative computation with an endogenous...

We consider two-round elimination tournaments where players have fixed resources instead of cost functions. Two approaches are suggested. If the players have the same resources and a success function is stochastic, then players always spend more resources in the first than in the second round in...

Abstract: In a society where individuals differ in their valuation of different social policies, when might one consider a given individual as having references that are extreme relative to the others? And how important are such preferences in determining eventual policy? In this paper, we...

An assesment aggregation rule is a mechanism which collapses several individual assessments ("quantitative opinions") into a unique ("collective") assessment. Individual i can manipulate assessment aggregation if the change in the aggregated assessmentdue to a change in i's assesment from x to...

Human groups may be analysed as organisations of networks of relationships between their members. This article proposes an exercise in theoretic speculation about participation and democracy based on the analytic tools of a relational-informational theory the bases of which come from...

To date, most experimental studies of the tragedy of the anticommons treat individuals’ preferences as common knowledge. Here, we conduct experiments in which values are private information. We vary the bargaining institution, the buyer's signaled willingness to pay, and the fraction of...