The premiss-based approach to judgment aggregation

In the framework of judgment aggregation, we assume that some formulas of the agenda are singled out as premisses, and that both Independence (formula-wise aggregation) and Unanimity Preservation hold for them. Whether premiss-based aggregation thus defined is compatible with conclusion-based aggregation, as defined by Unanimity Preservation on the non-premisses, depends on how the premisses are logically connected, both among themselves and with other formulas. We state necessary and sufficient conditions under which the combination of both approaches leads to dictatorship (resp. oligarchy), either just on the premisses or on the whole agenda. Our analysis is inspired by the doctrinal paradox of legal theory and is arguably relevant to this field as well as political science and political economy. When the set of premisses coincides with the whole agenda, a limiting case of our assumptions, we obtain several existing results in judgment aggregation theory.     

Optimal agenda-setter timing

Abstract .  We analyze the optimal timing problem of an agenda setter who can propose a project that is then voted on by a committee. The payoff consists of a common stochastic component and an idiosyncratic component that differs among committee members. The agenda setter may be biased for or against the project, relative to the median committee member, and chooses when to call the vote. We analyze how the timing decision depends on the political environment and the bias of the agenda setter. We show that both positively and negatively biased agenda setters can implement decisions that differ from those preferred by the median committee member.     

Planning and Urban Growth: An Anglo-American Comparison

Understanding the complexity of institutional change is a necessary step in gaining deeper knowledge of economic performance over time, and it is one of the main challenges in the research agenda of institutionalism. Institutional change can be studied using a variety of theoretical approaches. We study some of the main approaches to institutional change in original economic institutionalism and new institutional economics. First, after comparing the approaches of Émile Durkheim and Thorstein Veblen, we focus on the contributions of the instrumental value theory and other original institutional traditions in the study of institutional change. Second, new institutional economics improved on the weak points of rational choice institutionalism regarding institutional change and incorporated the “institutions-as-rules” approach (Douglass North) and the “institutions-as-equilibria” approach (Avner Greif, Masahiko Aoki). We analyze both approaches to institutional change. Furthermore, we present an updated nonintegral overview of approaches to institutional change, show several interconnections between original and new institutionalisms, and conclude that the dialogue between the different theories of institutional change is relevant and beneficial.     

Relaxing Pareto optimality in economic environments

Summary.  The individual preference domain is the family of profiles of economic preferences on the set of allocations of public or private goods, or both. The agenda domain assumption allows for a finite lower bound on the size of a feasible set. If a social choice correspondence satisfies nonimposition, Arrow’s choice axiom, and independence of infeasible alternatives then it is directly or inversely dictatorial, or null. Received: October 10, 1995; revised version: June 20, 1996     

On reading Hayek: Choice, consequences and The Road to Serfdom

The basic thesis in The Road to Serfdom is that the lure of socialist ideology has the unintended and undesirable consequence of economic depravation and political tyranny when countries follow its policy agenda. Socialist planning requires economic planners to assume a level of responsibility for economic life in a country which is both cumbersome to the point of impossible, and powerful beyond any reasonable limit that could be safely trusted to any one individual or group of individuals. The papers in this symposium provide a critical reading of the Hayek's thesis on socialism. While many strong points are made in the discussion, the critical reading of Hayek offered must ultimately be judged unsatisfactory. The issues of choice and consequences are not addressed, and as a result the basic argument presented in The Road to Serfdom is never adequately engaged.     

Independence of irrelevant alternatives and consistency of choice

Summary. We show that Arrow's condition of independence of irrelevant alternatives is logically related to conditions of consistency of choice (in particular, to Arrow's choice axiom). The relation, however, is indirect. The link is provided by an independence condition due to Hansson (Synthese, 1969) which applies to fixed agenda social choice rules.     

Judgment aggregation: (im)possibility theorems

The aggregation of individual judgments over interrelated propositions is a newly arising field of social choice theory. I introduce several independence conditions on judgment aggregation rules, each of which protects against a specific type of manipulation by agenda setters or voters. I derive impossibility theorems whereby these independence conditions are incompatible with certain minimal requirements. Unlike earlier impossibility results, the main result here holds for any (non-trivial) agenda. However, independence conditions arguably undermine the logical structure of judgment aggregation. I therefore suggest restricting independence to “premises”, which leads to a generalised premise-based procedure. This procedure is proven to be possible if the premises are logically independent.     

Referendum and the choice between monarchy and republic in Greece

Drawing on the 1974 Greek parliamentary elections and constitutional referendum which abolished the monarchy, the paper employs a spatial decision model to examine the strategic use of a parliamentary election and a non mandatory referendum by an agenda setter. The parliamentary election bundles two issues, the right to form a government and the right to choose the form of state. This implies that the election campaign efforts to attract votes are different from the campaign efforts to win an election for government and a separate referendum for the form of state. The choice of the agenda setter turns out to depend on his costs of campaign efforts in the different contests relative to those of the opposition, his benefits to be gained from winning the different contests, his comparative electoral appeal and the probability that the referendum secures his favourite outcome.     

The informational role of supermajorities

We study a collective decision making environment where an agenda setter makes strategic proposals to privately informed voters who vote strategically. We show that, consistent with empirical evidence, it can be optimal for the agenda setter to propose supermajorities. Due to an informational role that we unveil, optimal supermajorities can be less costly than minimum winning coalitions, even though more voters are awarded a positive share. We also examine consequences in terms of quality of decision making. We show that the introduction of a strategic agenda setter can lead to socially suboptimal decisions.     

The impact of offering two versus three alternatives in choice modelling experiments

Researchers designing choice modelling experiments have some latitude over the number of choice alternatives that can be offered in each choice set. There is some evidence that design dimensions, including the number of alternatives available in each choice set, can influence model outcomes. A key issue is whether referendum formats with binary options are preferable to choice sets with multiple alternatives.A choice modelling experiment was performed where questionnaires delivered to two split samples differed only according to whether two or three alternatives were offered to respondents in each choice set. The results indicate that more robust models could be constructed from the three-alternative split compared to the two-alternative split. One reason for the difference is that respondents tended to display serial non-participation in the two-alternative format, choosing an alternative consistently without regard for changes in the attributes. For practitioners of the CM technique, the results suggest that it may be preferable to offer more than two alternatives in a choice set that includes a status quo option.     

Choice modeling at the “market stall”: Individual versus collective interest in environmental valuation

The market stall, or valuation workshop, has recently been proposed as a way of addressing some of the limitations of conventional stated preference analysis. In this paper, we attempt to combine a participatory technique similar to the “citizens' jury” with choice modelling, a stated preference technique increasingly being applied in environmental economics. Our focus is on how changes in the context of decision-making (between choices made in isolation and those made in a group setting, and between choices made on individual well being versus collective criteria) produce differences in estimated welfare measures. The empirical context used is that of water quality improvements under the Water Framework Directive, the most significant reform in water legislation in the European Union for many years. We find that the choice experiment format can be successfully implemented in a valuation workshop and that moving from individual to collective choice produces, in this instance, a rather interesting change in both values and preferences which depends on the respondent's interests.     

农业生产力因素及其质态论

农业生产力因素按其转化为生产力的方式可以被划分为物质生产因素和非物质生产因素，其具体构成可概括为十个方面。同时，农业生产力因素的构成并非杂乱堆砌，而是由特定的农业生产力因素在特定的关联方式下所形成的有机整体，是类型、层次和指标的统一。     

The political economy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: a ‘21st Century’ trade agreement?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was the first of the ‘Mega-FTAs’ to be signed. Had it been ratified, it would have created the world’s largest preferential trade area. The negotiators of the TPP aspired to create ‘a next-generation transformative agreement’ that would address a new trade agenda focused on regulatory coherence and business facilitation. The expectation was that this agenda would generate a 21st Century trade politics that would be less contentious, at least among business actors, than traditional negotiations on market access. Studies of another Mega-FTA under negotiation, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that has a similar agenda found unified business support for the agreement domestically and the emergence of transnational business coalitions in support of the agreement. Recent theorising on trade politics suggests, however, that global value chains (GVCs) that involve vertical intra-industry trade introduce ‘traditional’ distributional issues that will divide business interests domestically – and, in the case of GVCs organised on different geographical bases, internationally as well. This cleavage was evident in the TPP negotiations, unlike those for TTIP, as were other divisions among business – both domestically and across countries – over the sharing of existing rents and of new rents generated by regulatory harmonisation.     

The source of some paradoxes from social choice and probability

An elementary argument is developed to explain and unite several paradoxes coming from probability and from social choice. This geometric approach is illustrated with new results about the intransitivities of election rankings over subsets of alternatives, agenda manipulation, conditional probability, and waiting times.     

Choices, situations, and happiness

This article explores some conceptual issues in the study of well-being using the traditional economic approach of inferring preferences solely from choice behavior. We argue that choice behavior alone can never reveal which situations make people better off, even with unlimited data and under the maintained hypothesis of 100% rational choice. Ancillary assumptions or additional forms of data such as happiness measures are always needed. With such ancillary assumptions and additional data, however, the use of revealed preference to study well-being can be significantly improved, so that the choices people make can jointly identify preferences, mistakes, and well-being.     

Risk taking with additive and multiplicative background risks

We examine the effects of background risks on optimal portfolio choice. Examples of background risks include uncertain labor income, uncertainty about the terminal value of fixed assets such as housing and uncertainty about future tax liabilities. While some of these risks are additive and have been amply studied, others are multiplicative in nature and have received far less attention. The simultaneous effect of both additive and multiplicative risks has hitherto not received attention and can explain some paradoxical choice behavior. We rationalize such behavior and show how background risks might lead to seemingly U-shaped relative risk aversion for a representative investor.     

Lobbying and discretion

When interest groups compete to influence legislators, the resulting legislation is often vague, and thus obliges the groups to continue their fight in the executive. On its face, this seems inefficient—at least from the point of view of the groups. We explore this intuition in a model of “nested lobbying” in which interest groups first compete to influence a legislative agenda setter, then compete to influence legislative votes over the resulting agenda. If the resulting legislation grants discretion to the executive, the final prize is allocated in yet one more contest in the bureaucracy. We find that when the status quo is non-discretionary, competition over the agenda never results in an agenda that includes discretion. Surprisingly, however, a discretionary status quo can stand with probability 1 if the preferences of the bureaucracy, the legislature, and the agenda setter are arranged in an “iron triangle”. Specifically, the bureaucracy and agenda setter must be biased in favor of one group, while the legislature is biased in favor of the other.     

It's Not a Laughing Matter: Critical Geopolitics,Humour and Unlaughter

This paper explores the possibilities of considering humour and laughter as a serious matter of concern for critical geopolitics and political geography more generally. While there has been some interest in this topic, there is scope to devise a more expansive research agenda. Using both laughter and Michael Billig's notion of unlaughter, the paper considers how these visceral expressions contribute, often in subtle ways, to the making of geopolitical subjectivities. The final part of the paper considers some possibilities for future research.     

The choice of excise taxes when savings and labour decisions are distorted

The framework is a simple two period life-cycle model with identical individuals who work in period 1 and are retired in period 2. Initially there are optimally chosen uniform income and commodity tax rates, which lead to distortions in both the labour/leisure choice and the consumption/savings choice. The purpose is to demonstrate in an intuitively comprehensible way how differentiating commodity taxation by slightly increasing the tax on one consumption good can mitigate existing distortions. The sufficient conditions for a welfare improvement are similar to that of Corlett and Hague plus some conditions on average and marginal consumption propensities.