Democratic societies have been increasingly confronted with extreme, knife-edge election outcomes that affect everybody’s lives and contribute to social instability. Even if political compromises based on social conventions as equity or economic arguments as efficiency are available, polarized...

We study the random assignment of indivisible objects among a set of agents with strict preferences. We show that there exists no mechanism which is unanimous, strategy-proof and envy-free. Weakening the first requirement to q-unanimity – i.e., when every agent ranks a different object at the...

The existence of a Paretian and finitely anonymous ordering in the set of infinite utility streams implies the existence of a non-Ramsey set (a nonconstructive object whose existence requires the axiom of choice). Therefore, each Paretian and finitely anonymous quasi-ordering either is...

In this note, three major areas of Buchanan's research are briefly described: (1) The ideas of Knut Wicksell on Buchanan's work, (2) constitutional economics and the veil of ignorance, and (3) the role of government and/or the power to tax. It is shown that these three areas had a major...

We analyze how the introduction of the voting advice application (VAA) smartvote affects voter turnout, voting behavior and electoral outcomes. The Swiss context offers an ideal setting to identify the causal effects of online information with aggregate real world data because smartvote was...

We consider a test of expressive voting developed by Brennan and Lomasky (1993). They point out that in presidential elections the probability of a tie, and casting a decisive vote, increases “multi-billionfold” as the election becomes increasingly close. They conjecture that if voters are...

We provide a potential explanation for the absence of, and unwillingness to create, centralized power in the hands of a national state in many societies based on the political agenda effect. State centralization induces citizens of different backgrounds, interests, regions or ethnicities to...

The problem of social choice is studied on a domain with countably many individuals. In contrast to most of the existing literature which establish either non-constructive possibilities or approximate (i.e. invisible) dictators, we show that if one adds a continuity property to the usual set of...

We study a model of endogenous means testing where households differ in their income and where the in-kind transfer received by each household declines with income. Majority voting determines the two dimensions of public policy: the size of the welfare program and the means-testing rate. We...