legislative district configurations and fiscal policy in american states in accordance with the median voter theorem the median legislator is decisive in representative democracy if the preferences of the median legislator differ from the preferences of the median voter in the polity fiscal policy choices will predictably diverge from those favored by the median voter this paper seeks to identify the median district and therein the preferences driving the median legislator in american state legislatures using economic characteristics of constituents we find substantial differences between the median district and the statewide median as the income of the median district rises above the median income of the polity government expenditures increase in addition the degree to which income is skewed across legislative districts affects spending for redistribution programs finally we find that direct democracy procedures which allow the statewide median voter to check legislative decisions limit the impact of differences between the district and polity medians

equilibrium in a stock market economy with shareholder voting this paper demonstrates the existence of a shareholders equilibrium for a two period stock market economy in which there may be fewer securities than states of the world there are two allocation mechanisms in the economy firms owners may vote direction restricted majority rule to change firms production plans across states while keeping shareholdings fixed and individuals may trade their shares and stocks of a current production consumption good while keeping firms plans fixed a shareholders equilibrium is a set of firms plans and an allocation of shares and the current good which are stable with respect to both mechanisms copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

electoral equilibria with entry some simulations the objective of this paper is to investigate by means of simulation the impact of third party entry on the spatial separation of candidates specifically we do real time simulations of palfrey s 1984 model of electoral equilibria with entry after relaxing some of its assumptions our finding that the threat of third party entry can induce virtually the same spatial separation of the major party candidates as entry with certainty is both a strong and interesting result

a solution concept for majority rule in dynamic settings we define and explore the notion of a dynamic condorcet winner dcw which extends the notion of a condorcet winner to dynamic settings we show that for every dcw every member of a large class of dynamic majoritarian games has an equivalent equilibrium and that other equilibria are not similarly portable across this class of games existence of dcws is guaranteed when members of the community are sufficiently patient we characterize sustainable and unsustainable outcomes study the effects of changes in the discount factor investigate efficiency properties and explore the potential for achieving renegotiation proof outcomes we apply this solution concept to a standard one dimensional choice problem wherein agents have single peaked preferences as well as to one involving the division of a fixed aggregate payoff

corporate social responsibility of the most highly reputed european and north american firms the objective of this article is double first to analyze using a descriptive analysis the main differences in the level and components of social behaviour between european and north american firms and second to contrast empirically using a multiple linear regression model whether the motives behind corporate social behaviour are different depending on the region or country of the firm with this aim an indicator of social behaviour termed effort in sustainability has been constructed by aggregating the firm s social effort with customers employees community and environment for a sample of the 40 european and north american companies most highly reputed in the years 2003 and 2004 the results obtained indicate that the region or country of the firm influences the level components and motivation of its social behaviour

supplier relations and the market context a theory of handshakes abstract this paper analyzes the degree of formality in industrial procurement contracts impose cost discipline on suppliers but stifle cooperative innovation noncontractual procurement provides cooperation but poor cost discipline however cost discipline comes naturally when there is not much vertical integration because the promise of finding an alternative buyer to use as a bargaining threat enhances the supplier s incentive to make efficiency enhancing investments thus highly integrated industries use contracts while less integrated industries do business on handshakes in the latter cooperative innovations flourish this may help explain some international comparisons and changes in business practices observed over time

do non socially responsible companies achieve legitimacy through socially responsible actions the mediating effect of innovation this study investigates the effects on organization s financial performances of first the extent to which the organizations are involved in controversial business activities and second their level of social performance these companies can be considered non socially responsible given the harmful nature of the activities they are involved in managers of these companies may still have incentives to pursue socially responsible actions if they believe that engaging on those actions will help them to achieve legitimacy and improve investors perception about them we develop a comprehensive methodology to investigate these corporate social performance csp related effects in a complex but specific setting to this end we analyze a sample of 202 us firms for the period 2005 2008 using a novel method in this area partial least squares our results indicate that contrary to the general findings in prior literature companies involved in controversial business activities which engage in csp do not directly reduce the negative perception that stakeholders have about them instead we found evidence of a positive mediation effect of csp on financial market based performance through innovation

multiparty electoral competition in the netherlands and germany a model based on multinomial probit a typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share here we use euro barometer survey data and european elite study data from 1979 for the netherlands and germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response based on multinomial probit estimation for each of these countries we estimate a pure spatial electoral voting model and a joint spatial model the latter model also includes individual voter and demographic characteristics the pure spatial models for the two countries quite accurately described the electoral response as a stochastic function of party positions we use these models to perform a thought experiment so as to estimate the expected vote maximizing party positions we go on to propose a model of internal party decision making based both on pre election electoral estimation and post election coalition bargaining this model suggests why the various parties in the period in question did not adopt vote maximizing positions we argue that maximizing expected vote will not in general be a rational party strategy in multiparty political systems which are based on proportional representation

on the mis measurement of legislator ideology and shirking in this paper we show that current statistical measures of legislator s shirking are implicitly based on the electoral concept of a unique majority rule equilibrium point in the policy space where elections are contested we note that such equilibria do not exist generically and present statistical results showing that cross sectional regressions where legislators voting indices are predicted by district average demograhic and economic data are mis specified we also discuss a weaker equilibrium construct the uncovered set and present statistical evidence showing that differences in voting behavior between senators from the same state are positively related to the heterogeneity of the electorate we argue that current evidence alleged to show shirking by senators is equally consistent with senators who perfectly represent an idiosyncratic constituency that cannot be represented by district average data

reverse importing and asymmetric trade and fdi a networks explanation abstract this paper considers the impact of business and social networks on international trade and fdi i propose that differences in the strength of network effects across countries can produce asymmetric trade and investment flows that may lead to trade friction a firm from a country with strong network effects has a cost advantage in selling to buyers from its own country this advantage results in lower inward fdi lower total imports but larger volumes of reverse imports into the country with strong network effects the model s predictions match observed asymmetric trade and investment flows that sometimes lead to us japan trade friction

searching for equilibrium positions in a game of political competition with restrictions this paper considers a problem of political economy in which a nash equilibrium study is performed in a proposed game with restrictions where the two major parties in a country vary their position within a politically flexible framework to increase their number of voters the model as presented fits the reality of many countries moreover it avoids the uniqueness of equilibrium positions the problem is stated and solved from a geometric point of view

investments holdup and the form of market contracts the authors analyze incomplete contracts to induce efficient investment with exogenous switching costs fixed price contracts are efficient generate some rigidity in prices are renegotiated intermittently by possibly small amounts and when inflation is positive generate asymmetric responses to shocks all consistent with evidence on prices and wages with two sided specific investments efficiency requires prices to have sufficient escalator clauses to avoid renegotiation as observed in many long term contracts a third case with one sided specific investments can generate take or pay contracts and explain why firms sometimes pay for specific investments that appear to benefit employees directly

voting over income taxation abstract a major problem of the positive theory of income taxation is to explain why statutory income tax schedules in practice are marginal rate progressive while it is commonly believed that this is but a simple consequence of the fact that the number of relatively poor voters exceeds that of richer voters in general putting this contention in a voting equilibrium context is not a trivial task we do this here in the context of nonlinear taxation and attempt to provide a formal argument in support of this heuristic claim we first establish the existence of mixed strategy equilibria and identify certain cases in which marginal rate progressive taxes are chosen almost surely by the political parties unfortunately we also find that if the tax policy space is not artificially constrained the support of at least one equilibrium cannot be contained within the set of marginal rate progressive taxes

valence politics and equilibrium in spatial election models spatial models of two party or two candidatecompetition almost never have pure strategy nashequilibria when the issue space has more than onedimension this paper shows that the introduction ofvalence issues can create conditions where equilibriaexist even in a multidimensional setting we derivesufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria and characterize the spatial locations of twocompeting parties or candidates when such equilibriaexist the party with the advantage on the valencedimension will generally take a moderate position onthe positional issues we consider the implications ofthese results for public perceptions of the parties incumbency advantages and realigning elections

a unified systems perspective of family firm performance abstract theory and practice indicate that in family influenced firms the interaction of the family unit the business entity and individual family members create unique systemic conditions and constituencies that impact the performance outcomes of the family business social system habbershon and williams fam bus rev 12 1999 1 have suggested that these unique systemic family influences can be captured through an analysis of the resources and capabilities of the organization in this paper we pursue their line of thinking and more specifically examine the systemic relationship of resources and capabilities as a source of advantage or constraint to the performance outcomes for family influenced firms the idiosyncratic firm level bundle of resources and capabilities resulting from the systems interactions are referred to as the familiness of the firm wealth creating performance for family influenced firms is a function of the distinctive familiness generated by the family business system the performance model focuses on a particular subset of family influenced firms whose performance goal is transgenerational wealth and wealth creation potential we refer to those families that meet this premise as enterprising families we develop a unified systems model of performance that links the resources and capabilities generated in the enterprising families system with their potential for transgenerational wealth creation

nash equilibrium strategies in directional models of two candidate spatial competition the standard approach to two party political competition in a multi dimensional issue space models voters as voting for the alternative that is located closest to their own most preferred location another approach to understanding voter choice is based on preferred direction of change with respect to some specified neutral point e g an origin or status quo point

the supermajority core of the us senate and the failure to join the league of nations the failure of the united states to join the league of nations is often considered to be an outcome of isolationist influence the supermajority requirement of treaty ratification in the us senate also is blamed for allowing a minority of isolationists to block the will of the majority that supported the treaty to determine the cause of the failure i analyze the senate debate over the treaty using the concepts of the supermajority core and supermajority winset using all 157 votes on the treaty i estimate senatorial positions and the locations of both the status quo and the treaty on the same metric space from this analysis i find that isolationists were not influential enough to block the ratification instead president wilson s unwillingness to compromise is found to have played a critical role in the treaty s defeat the treaty s defeat thus was not an indication of the power of isolationism this study contributes to the growing body of literature that debunks claims about the dominance of isolationism in the interwar period at the same time the paper demonstrates how the core and winset concepts can be useful in answering substantive collective choice questions

shareholder value stakeholder management and social issues what s the bottom line we test the relationship between shareholder value stakeholder management and social issue participation building better relations with primary stakeholders like employees customers suppliers and communities could lead to increased shareholder wealth by helping firms develop intangible valuable assets which can be sources of competitive advantage on the other hand using corporate resources for social issues not related to primary stakeholders may not create value for shareholders we test these propositions with data from s p 500 firms and find evidence that stakeholder management leads to improved shareholder value while social issue participation is negatively associated with shareholder value copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

the effects of firm size and industry on corporate giving recent downward trends in corporate giving have renewed interest in the factors that shape corporate philanthropy this paper examines the relationships between charitable contributions firm size and industry improvements over previous studies include an irs data base that covers a much broader range of firm sizes and industries as compared to previous studies and estimation using an instrumental variable technique that explicitly addresses potential simultaneity between charitable contributions and profitability important findings provide evidence of a cubic relationship between charitable giving and firm size and evidence of strong industry effects the plus minus plus regression coefficient sign pattern for the cubic firm size model suggests that small and large firms give more relative to total receipts with lower giving ratios among medium size firms one interpretation for this finding is that small firms are close to the communities they serve while high visibility creates a need for large firm philanthropy strong industry effects provide evidence of inter industry differences in giving culture and or different public relations requirements across industries

contract duration and relationship specific investments empirical evidence from coal markets this paper examines the importance of specific relationship investments in determining the duration of coal contracts negotiated between coal suppliers and electric utilities data for 277 coal contracts are used to perform the analysis the results provide strong support for the view that buyers and sellers make longer commitments to the terms of future trade at the contract execution stage and rely less on repeated bargaining when relationship specific investments are more important

sophisticated sincerity voting over endogenous agendas the empirical findings on whether or not legislators vote strategically are mixed this is at least partly due to the fact that to establish any hypothesis on strategic voting legislators preferences need to be known and these are typically private data in this note it is shown that under complete information if decision making is by the amendment procedure and if the agenda is set endogenously then sophisticated strategic voting over the resulting agenda is observationally equivalent to sincere voting the voting strategies however are sophisticated this fact has direct implications for empirical work on sophisticated voting

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

majority rule in the absence of a majority what is the meaning of majoritarianism in a judgement aggregation problem when the propositionwise majority view is logically inconsistent we argue that the majoritarian ideal is best embodied by the principle of supermajoritarian efficiency sme it is acceptable to overrule a supermajority in one proposition but only if this allows us to agree with a larger supermajority in some other proposition we show that for certain judgement spaces the sme outcome is generically unique for most spaces however there are a range of sme judgement aggregation rules we show that sme along with separability characterizes the class of additive support rules we then show that the median rule is the unique additive support rule which satisfies reinforcement upper hemicontinuity and a weak regularity condition this can be seen as a judgement aggregation analog of a classic result by young and levenglick

does firm size comfound the relationship between corporate social performance and firm financial performance there has been some theoretical and empirical debate that the positive relationship between corporate social performance csp and firm financial performance ffp is spurious and in fact caused by a third factor namely large firm size this study examines this question by integrating three meta analyses of more than two decades of research on 1 csp and ffp 2 firm size and csp and 3 firm size and ffp into one path analytic model the present study does not confirm size as a third factor which would confound the relationship between csp and ffp that is even if firm size is controlled for across studies comprising on average over 15 000 observations csp and ffp remain positively correlated showing a true score corrected path coefficient p of 0 37

negotiating cultures in corporate procurement abstract in a repeated procurement problem the incumbent can undertake a relationship specific investment that generates opportunity costs of switching for the buyer we investigate the impact of the negotiating culture on investment incentives favoritism in the procurement contract allocation and buyer profit we compare a stylized competitive negotiating culture with a stylized protective culture the cultures differ in the way the buyer uses the entrance threat to exert pressure on the incumbent our main result is that the relative performance of the cultures depends non monotonically on the expensiveness of the investment

corporate social performance and innovation with high social benefits a quantitative analysis this article analyses the link between innovation with high social benefits and corporate social performance csp and the role that family firms play in this this theme is particularly relevant given the large number of firms that are family owned also the implicit potential of innovation to reconcile corporate sustainability aspects with profitability justifies an extended analysis of this link governments often support socially beneficial innovation with various policy instruments with the intention of increasing international competitiveness and simultaneously supporting sustainable development in parallel firms pursue corporate social responsibility csr and environmental management activities partly in the hope that this will foster such innovation in their organisation alongside their main aim of improving csp hence the main research question of this article is about the association of csp with innovation with high social benefits and the determinants of the potential moderation of this association based on panel data the article analyses the link between csp and innovation and the effect of being a family firm using panel estimation techniques the results point to a moderating role of family firms on the link between innovation with high social benefits and csp the article concludes by assessing the policy implications of this insight

ministerial selection and intraparty organization in the contemporary british parliament preferences we explore the hypothesis that backbenchers preferences constrain the ministerial selection process in a manner that mitigates agency problems specifically promotion is distributed preferentially to members whose own policy preferences are proximate to the uncovered set of all party members preferences our analysis of ministerial appointments in the contemporary british parliament supports this view for both the labour and conservative parties front bench appointments are more sensitive to the collective preferences of backbenchers in each party as measured by the party uncovered set than to the preferences of the parties leaders m odern parliamentary government is at once cabinet government and party government it is cabinet government in that the legislative agenda is set by majority party leaders negotiating in private rather than by members voting on the chamber floor it is party government in that backbenchers generally operate as members of disciplined and programmatic organizations not as free agents these two aspects of parliamentary government are intimately

majority rule outcomes and the structure of debate in one issue at a time decision making in many group decision making situations such as faculty hiring decisions outcomes are often arrived at by deciding one issue at a time e g first rank then subfield it is well known that procedures limiting votes to separate orthogonal dimensions always result in a unique outcome at the generalized median the median of each separate issue dimension often however there is conflict within groups over what ought to be the relevant orthogonal dimensions within which choices will be made we show that the way in which debate is structured i e the way in which the dimensions of choice are specified can have important consequences for what outcome gets chosen however we also show that the range of outcomes that could arise from alternative structurings of the decision process is bounded these bounds are expressed relative to the yolk a sphere located centrally in the pareto set whose existence was first noted by tullock 1967 262 and whose properties have recently been developed by mckelvey 1986 and feld et al 1987 we find that in m orthogonal dimensions the feasible outcomes must lie within mathtype mtef 2 1 feaafiart1ev1aaatcvaufebsjuyzl2yd9gzlbvynv2caerbulwbln hiov2dgi1btfmbaexatlxbi9gbaerbd9wdylwzybitldharqqtubsr 4rnchbgeagqivu0je9sqqrpepc0xbbl8f4rqqrffpeea0xe9lq jc9 vqaqpepm0xbba9pwe9q8fs0 yqaqpepae9pg0firpepekkfr0xfr x fr xb9adbaqaaegacigaaiaabeqaamaabaabaagcbawaaoaaaeaaca qgtbaaleqaaaaa 36f8 sqrt text m radii of the center of the yolk

downstream r d raising rivals costs and input price contracts we analyze the incentives for cost reducing r d by downstream firms in a two tier market structure by increasing the demand for an input downstream r d allows the upstream firm to raise its input price this lowers the benefit of r d to a downstream firm but raises its rivals costs as a result a downstream oligopolist may invest more in r d than a downstream monopolist a phenomenon that is absent in a purely horizontal r d setting fixed price agreements where the input price remains unchanged following downstream r d promote innovation by eliminating the opportunistic behavior of the input supplier and are welfare enhancing

conceptualizing voter choice for directional and discounting models of two candidate spatial competition in terms of shadow candidates in contrast to the traditional modeling of voter choice based on proximity under directional models selection of candidates is based on the direction and or intensity of change from a status quo or neutral point voter choice can also be modeled as representing both approaches e g as a directional model with proximity restraint or alternatively in terms of proximity to discounted positions

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

covering dominance and institution free properties of social change this paper shows that different institutional structures for aggregation of preferences under majority rule may generate social choices that are quite similar so that the actual social choice may be rather insensitive to the choice of institutional rules specifically in a multidimensional setting where all voters have strictly quasi concave preferences it is shown that the uncovered set contains the outcomes that would arise from equilibrium behavior under three different institutional settings the three institutional settings are two candidate competition in a large electorate cooperative behavior in small committees and sophisticated voting behavior in a legislative environment where the agenda is determined endogenously because of its apparent institution free properties the uncovered set may provide a useful generalization of the core when a core does not exist a general existence theorem for the uncovered set is proven and for the downsian case bounds for the uncovered set are computed these bounds show that the uncovered set is centered around a generalized median set whose size is a measure of the degree of symmetry of the voter ideal points

majority rule and election models abstract this paper surveys the theoretical work that has been done on majority rule and economic models of elections section i provides an overview of the topic section 2 reviews the most important results that have been obtained about majority rule as an abstract collective choice rule section 3 identifies some alternative inferences that can be made from those results section 4 covers some models that include additional features that are present in political institutions where majority rule is used section 5 concentrates on some alternative election models and equilibrium concepts section 6 focuses on election models with abstentions and or candidate uncertainty about voter behaviour section 7 compares and contrasts models where candidates are certain about what the voters choices will be contingent upon about the choices made by the candidates and models where they are uncertain about those choices section 8 closes the survey by identifying some emerging areas of research

keiretsu and relationship specific investment a barrier to trade this article develops a model of informal procurement within japanese keiretsu so as to consider effects on intermediate good imports such as auto parts parts suppliers make relationship specific investments that benefit the automaker and prices are determined by bargaining after investment has been sunk although this investment raises efficiency it limits the range of imports to less important parts such as tailpipes and it is possible that no parts are imported despite lower foreign costs lack of information concerning investment rents combined with counterintuitive responses of imports to changes in output and costs could create unwarranted perceptions of a trade barrier

polarization politics and property rights links between inequality and growth most efforts to trace the effects of income inequality on growth have focused on redistribution however empirical investigation has not substantiated either the positive association of income inequality with redistribution or the negative association of redistribution with economic growth the authors analyze the effects of inequality in the broader context of social polarization they argue that social polarization whether rooted in income inequality or in ethnic tension makes large changes in current policies including those guaranteeing the security of contract and property rights more likely under a wide range of institutional arrangements the resulting uncertainties in the policy and contractual environment hinder growth they find strong empirical support for both parts of this argument the policy implications of their argument are quite distinct from those of arguments that inequality reduces growth by increasing pressures for redistribution if redistributive policies per se were to blame for the low growth resulting from inequality governments that seek to mitigate income inequality must inevitably confront a tradeoff between equity and growth if on the other hand the insecurity of property rights slows growth in unequal or otherwise polarized societies governments that commit over the long run to particular redistributive policies incur less risk of slowing economic growth fiscal redistribution that reduces inequality may actually increase growth by reducing the risks of political uncertainty

do several winning coalitions exist in a state for senators of the same party evidence from an event study we argue that u s senators from the same state and in the same party form different winning coalitions we also develop a theory that stipulates that parties encourage these senators to form very distinct constituency coalitions parties use committee assignments as a carrot to give these senators an incentive to represent different groups in our empirical analysis we find that there are fewer overlapping committee assignments among senators in the same state when they are from the same party we also consider the case of john heinz and arlen specter both pennsylvania republicans when john heinz died in a plane crash political action committees pacs that bought influence from specter but not heinz now had the possibility that the new senator replacing heinz would include them in his resource constituency the resulting competition by the new pennsylvania senator and specter for campaign resources would lower the price these firms had to pay for representation thus improving their expected future earnings

uncovering evidence of conditional party government reassessing majority party influence in congress and state legislatures temporary american legislatures our use of a new analytic technique a grid search program for characterizing the uncovered set enables us to begin with a better model of legislative proceedings that abandons the simple one dimensional spatial models in favor of the more realistic two dimensional version our conclusions are based on the analysis of real world data rather than on arguments about the relative merits of different theoretic assumptions our analysis confirms that when legislators preferences are polarized outcomes will generally be closer to the majority party s wishes even if the majority party leadership does nothing to influence the legislative process this conclusion notwithstanding our analysis also shows that at the margin of the majority party s natural advantage agenda setting by the majority party remains a viable and efficacious strategy in the debate over party organizations in the american congress one side e g aldrich and rohde 1998 2001 argues that the majority party can influence the outcome of legislative proceedings through agenda control or the ability to determine which proposals are considered the other side e g krehbiel 1999 2000 argues that agenda control conveys no power and that the majority party s apparent influence

the calculus of consensus democracy rethinking patterns of democracy without veto players we present a theory of comparative political institutions based on the concept of consensus democracy and social choice theory unlike lijphart we argue that consensus democracy is not a special form of democracy characterized by mutual vetoes but rather the simplest form of democracy which we refer to as pr majority rule we construct a typology of political institutions based on differences with this simple model contra tsebelis s veto players approach our theory predicts that pr majority rule should be the most flexible form of democracy we test this with data on overall patterns of government spending and on welfare state reform

issue yield a model of party strategy in multidimensional space parties in pluralist democracies face numerous contentious issues but most models of electoral competition assume a simple often one dimensional structure we develop a new inherently multidimensional model of party strategy in which parties compete by emphasizing policy issues issue emphasis is informed by two distinct goals mobilizing the party s core voters and broadening the support base accommodating these goals dissolves the position valence dichotomy through a focus on policies that unite the party internally while also attracting support from the electorate at large we define issue yield as the capacity of an issue to reconcile these criteria and then operationalize it as a simple index results of multilevel regressions combining population survey data and party manifesto scores from the 2009 european election study demonstrate that issue yield governs party strategy across different political contexts

stability and centrality of legislative choice in the spatial context majority rule spatial voting games lacking a core still always present a near core outcome more commonly known as the copeland winner this is the alternative that defeats or ties the greatest number of alternatives in the space previous research has not tested the copeland winner as a solution concept for spatial voting games without a core lacking a way to calculate where the copeland winner was with an infinite number of alternatives we provide a straightforward algorithm to find the copeland winner and show that it corresponds well to experimental outcomes in an important set of experimental legislative voting games we also provide an intuitive motivation for why legislative outcomes in the spatial context may be expected to lie close to the copeland winner finally we show a connection between the copeland winner and the shapley value and provide a simple but powerful algorithm to calculate the copeland scores of all points in the space in terms of the modified power values of each of the voters and their locations in the space

cycle avoiding trajectories strategic agendas and the duality of memory and foresight an informal exposition this paper considers the notion of cycle avoiding trajectories in majority voting tournaments and shows that they underlie and guide several apparently disparate voting processes the set of alternatives that are maximal with respect to such trajectories constitutes a new solution set of considerable significance it may be dubbed the banks set in recognition of the important paper by banks 1985 that first made use of this set the purpose of this paper is to informally demonstrate that the banks set is a solution set of broad relevance for understanding group decision making in both cooperative and non cooperative settings and under both sincere and sophisticated voting in addition we show how sincere and sophisticated voting processes can be viewed as mirror images of one another embodying respectively dmemory and foresight we also show how to develop the idea of a sophisticated agenda one in which the choice of what alternatives to propose is itself a matter of strategic calculation

constitutional political economy in the european union this article surveys recent research in constitutional political economy in europe although not all of theworks discussed necessarily focus only on european constitutional issues or are written by europeans european constitutional issues figure importantly in each area surveyed the article examines the literatures linking constitutional institutions to economic growth government size government deficits and corruption bicameralism direct democracy and federalism three exclusively european topics also are covered constitutional issues in the transition countries the structure of the european union and the draft constitution for the european union

a model of farsighted voting i present a new method of interpreting voter preferences in settings where policy remains in effect until replaced by new legislation in such settings voters consider not only the utility they receive from a given policy today but also the utility they will receive from policies likely to replace that policy in the future the model can be used to characterize both long term preferences and distributions over policy outcomes in situations where policy is ongoing and voters are farsighted

does social performance really lead to financial performance accounting for endogeneity the empirical relationship between a firm s social performance and its financial performance is still not well established in the literature despite more than 30 years of research and more than 100 empirical studies on the issue the results are still mixed we argue that the heterogeneous results found in previous studies are not due exclusively to problems related with the measurement instruments or the samples used instead we posit that a more fundamental problem related with the endogeneity of social strategic decisions could be driving most of the empirical findings we show that using a panel data of 658 firms from 1991 to 2005 how some of the results found in previous research change and some are even reversed when endogeneity is properly taken into account

social choice and electoral competition in the general spatial model this paper extends the theory of the core the uncovered set and the related undominated set to a general set of alternatives and an arbitrary measure space of voters we investigate the properties of social preferences generated by simple games we extend results on generic emptiness of the core we prove the general nonemptiness of the uncovered and undominated sets and we prove the upper hemicontinuity of these correspondences when the voters preferences are such that the core is nonempty and externally stable finally we give conditions under which the undominated set is lower hemicontinuous

towards a theory of bicameralism the neglected contributions of the calculus of consent in the calculus of consent 1962 235 buchanan and tullock assert 1 ceteris paribus while a coalition controlling less than a majority of voters may control in either chamber the greater the difference in the bases of representation in the two houses the less likely is any given coalition of voters to control a majority of the seats in both chambers 2 the potential of cross chamber logrolls on issues of unequal intensity increases the likelihood that a minority may effectively control policy making we link these ideas to social theory approaches to bicameralism and for the empirical study of legislatures

an experimental study of the efficiency of unanimity rule and majority rule scholars traditionally claim that unanimity rule is more capable of producing pareto optimal outcomes than majority rule dougherty and edward public choice 151 3 655 678 2012 make the opposite claim assuming proposals are either random sincere or strategic we test these competing hypotheses in a two dimensional framework using laboratory experiments our primary results suggest 1 majority rule enters the pareto set more quickly than unanimity rule 2 majority rule leaves the pareto set at the same rate as unanimity rule and 3 majority rule is more likely to select a pareto optimal outcome than unanimity rule at the end of the game

the construct validity of the kinder lydenberg domini social performance ratings data carroll 1991 encouraged researchers in social issues management sim to continue to measure corporate social performance csp from a variety of different perspectives utilizing a variety of different measures in addition wolfe and aupperle 1991 and others have asserted that there is no single best way to measure csp and that multiple measures and perspectives help develop the field however pfeffer 1993 suggest that a lack of consistent measurement has constrained organization studies and by implication the field of social issues management in its development as a field it may be in the best interest of social issues management researchers to try to development a common body of measures and data recently kinder lydenberg and domini co kld a social choice investment advisory firm has made available their social performance database the kld data have potential to become a widely accepted set of csp measures the purpose of this paper is to present a construct validity study comparing the kld data to other measures of csp

using cost observation to regulate firms the paper emphasizes the use of accounting data in regulatory or procurement contracts when the supplier 1 has superior information about the cost of the project and 2 invests in cost reduction the main result states that under risk neutrality the supplier announces an expected cost and is given an incentive contract linear in cost overruns this optimal contract moves toward a fixed price contract as the announced cost decreases an investment choice is then introduced and the use of a rate of return regulation is studied

trade and market thickness effects on organizations globalization by raising the number of buyers available to each seller and the number of sellers available to each buyer raises the thickness or the effective number of participants of every market market thickness can have subtle effects on incentives and organizations alleviating hold up problems resulting in less vertical integration more informal contracting and more cooperative and innovative relationships with subcontractors however it can also weaken long run relationships distorting relationship specific investments and risk sharing this paper surveys the theory and empirical evidence indicating when market thickness helps and when it hurts jel f15 l14 l22

redefining innovation eco innovation research and the contribution from ecological economics while innovation processes toward sustainable development eco innovations have received increasing attention during the past years theoretical and methodological approaches to analyze these processes are poorly developed against this background the term eco innovation is introduced in this paper addressing explicitly three kinds of changes towards sustainable development technological social and institutional innovation secondly the potential contribution of neoclassical and co evolutionary approaches from environmental and innovation economics to eco innovation research is discussed three peculiarities of eco innovation are identified the double externality problem the regulatory push pull effect and the increasing importance of social and institutional innovation while the first two are widely ignored in innovation economics the third is at the least not elaborated appropriately the consideration of these peculiarities may help to overcome market failure by establishing a specific eco innovation policy and to avoid a technology bias through a broader understanding of innovation finally perspectives for a specific contribution of ecological economics to eco innovation research are drawn it is argued that methodological pluralism as established in ecological economics would be very beneficial for eco innovation research a theoretical framework integrating elements from both neoclassical and evolutionary approaches should be pursued in order to consider the complexity of factors influencing innovation decisions as well as the specific role of regulatory instruments and the experience gathered in ecological economics integrating ecological social and economic aspects of sustainable development is highly useful for opening up innovation research to social and institutional changes 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

determinants of environmental innovation new evidence from german panel data sources abstract in most cases empirical analyses of environmental innovations based on firm level data relied on surveys for one point in time these surveys allow for the inclusion of many explanatory variables such as different policy instruments or the influence of pressure groups but it is not possible to address the dynamic character of environmental innovations this paper uses two german panel databases the establishment panel of the institute for employment research iab and the mannheim innovation panel mip of the centre for european economic research zew to explore the determinants of environmental innovations the econometric estimations show that the improvement of the technological capabilities knowledge capital by r d triggers environmental innovations environmental regulation environmental management tools and general organizational changes also encourage environmental innovation a result that has also been postulated by the famous porter hypothesis

legislator voting and shirking a critical review of the literature we set out to critically review the progress in answering two related questions what determines how legislators vote and how can shirking by legislators be measured in the first category the hypothesis that legislators shirk in order to indulge their personal ideological preferences has led researchers astray the theoretical underpinning is shaky on two counts first legislators who indulge their preferences at the expense of their constituents preferences put themselves at a competitive electoral disadvantage second the original two stage procedure used to measure ideological shirking is severely flawed among many other problems the residual measure of shirking implicitly assumes that the median voter is the relevant constituent principal for the legislator agent

formal versus informal legislative bargaining we study how the formality of a bargaining procedure affects its outcome we compare a formal baron ferejohn bargaining procedure to an informal procedure where players make and accept proposals in continuous time both constitute non cooperative games corresponding to the same bargaining problem a three player median voter setting with an external disagreement point this allows us to study formality in the presence and absence of a core and provides a natural explanation for the effects of preference polarization our results show that polarization hurts the median player and that formality matters the median player is significantly better off under informal bargaining

the mean voter theorem necessary and sufficient conditions for convergent equilibrium formal models of elections have emphasized the convergence of party leaders towards the centre of the electoral distribution this paper attempts to resolve the apparent disparity between the formal result and the perception of political divergence by considering a model incorporating valence valence can be interpreted as the non policy basis of political judgement made by the electorate concerning the quality of political contenders the theorem presented here shows that there is a necessary condition for convergence the condition involves the difference in party valences and the electoral variance when the condition fails the low valence parties will be forced to adopt policy positions far from the electoral centre the inference appears to be substantiated by an empirical model of the israel election in 1996 copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

the core and the stability of group choice in spatial voting games the core of a voting game is the set of undominated outcomes that is those that once in place cannot be overturned for spatial voting games a core is structurally stable if it remains in existence even if there are small perturbations in the location of voter ideal points while for simple majority rule a core will exist in games with more than one dimension only under extremely restrictive symmetry conditions we show that for certain supramajorities a core must exist we also provide conditions under which it is possible to construct a structurally stable core if there are only a few dimensions our results demonstrate the stability properties of such frequently used rules as two thirds and three fourths we further explore the implications of our results for the nature of political stability by looking at outcomes in experimental spatial voting games and at belgian cabinet formation in the late 1970s

centripetal and centrifugal incentives in electoral systems this paper investigates how electoral laws affect the position taking incentives of parties and candidates it seeks to extend the finding presented in the classical median voter theorem to a wide class of electoral systems or to show the limits of such extension the factors examined are the district magnitude the electoral formula the number of votes each voter is allowed to cast whether voters can cumulate their votes and whether voters can partially abstain i suggest a crude division of electoral systems into those producing predominantly centripetal incentives and those producing predominantly centrifugal incentives among the factors found to produce centripetal incentives at least in noncumulative systems are the following increases in the number of votes per voter outlawry of partial abstention and decreases in the district magnitude in systems allowing the cumulation of votes matters are a bit different

distributive politics and electoral competition abstract within the framework of pure redistribution dividing one unit of a homo geneous good among identical individuals the paper analyses the redistribution that arises from downsian two party electoral competition it appears that the strategic behavior of vote maximizing parties leads them to propose divisions which are not far from the egalitarian one journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d63 d72

innovation ethics and entrepreneurship this paper is a response to ray s 2004 recent proposal that the intellectual property rights ipr attached to potentially life saving life sustaining innovations should become public goods in cases where markets are either unable or unwilling to pay for the creation of the intellectual property using a free market approach to innovation based on western moral philosophy we suggest that treating intellectually protected life saving life sustaining innovations as public goods will likely reduce social welfare over the long term

on the nature of equilibria in a downsian model with candidate valence abstract i analyze mixed strategy equilibria in a downsian model with two office motivated candidates in which one candidate is endowed with a sufficiently large valence advantage that a voter might prefer this candidate even if the voter strictly prefers the other candidate s policies there is a discrete one dimensional policy space and the preferences of the median voter are uncertain i show that there is a range of moderate policies with no gaps that are optimal for the advantaged candidate there is also a range of liberal policies with no gaps and a corresponding range of conservative policies with no gaps that are optimal actions for the disadvantaged candidate the upper and lower bounds on these ranges of policies vary in predictable ways with the size of the advantaged candidate s advantage

green business and blue angels this paper presents a model of a monopolist svoluntary overcompliance with legal environmentalstandards under asymmetric information about thefirm s environmental impacts the key assumptions are the existence of quality premia for environmentalsoundness a positive but imperfect degree ofmonitoring and adaptive consumer expectations conditions necessary for overcompliance to arise in aprofit maximizing equilibrium are derived the effectsof a third party eco labeling system are analyzed itis shown that the existence of an independent labelingauthority increases the likelihood of overcomplianceto be profit maximizing moreover firms might have anincentive to lobby for the introduction of such asystem the effect of consumers risk preferences andan instrument for preventing greenwash companieslying about their environmental performance is alsodiscussed

do differences in presidential economic advisers matter using data on members on the council of economic advisors as well as us treasury secretaries and omb directors from 1952 through 2005 i investigate the effect of economic advisors educational and employment backgrounds on the time series performance of several policy variables ivy league advisors appear to raise non defense government spending although the size of the impact differs by president while voter preferences appear to matter for a wider variety of policy variables changes in federal regulation and marginal tax rates the share of ivy league advisors is at least as important as voter preferences in explaining non defense spending

determinants of environmental innovation in us manufacturing industries abstract this paper provides new evidence on the determinants of environmental innovation we employ panel data models to study how environmental innovation by us manufacturing industries responded to changes in pollution abatement expenditures and regulatory enforcement during the period 1983 through 1992 we find that 1 environmental innovation as measured by the number of successful environmental patent applications granted to the industry responded to increases in pollution abatement expenditures however 2 increased monitoring and enforcement activities related to existing regulations did not provide any additional incentive to innovate we also find some empirical evidence that environmental innovation is more likely to occur in industries that are internationally competitive

political rents and voter information in search equilibrium abstract political parties committed to grab rents may run for election and even win if citizens are uninformed but how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search we propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout we show that i the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies i i the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely u shaped in the information search cost i i i turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system

voting for pareto optimality a multidimensional analysis we compare unanimity rule and majority rule in their abilities to produce pareto superior and pareto optimal alternatives in fixed number of rounds of voting using a two dimensional spatial voting model with random proposals sincere proposals and strategic proposals our findings show that for random or sincere proposals majority rule is at least as likely to select a pareto optimal outcome as unanimity rule for strategic proposals the subgame perfect equilibrium under unanimity rule is pareto optimal for other k majority rules the outcome is pareto optimal or very close to it for outcomes that are both pareto optimal and pareto superior unanimity rule outperforms majority rule

sources of technical innovation in the network of companies providing chemical process plant and equipment abstract the purpose of this paper is to explore issues concerning technological innovation in the network of firms linked to the chemical industry with particular reference to the process plant contracting industry while technological and economic maturity inhibit the research and development activities of plant contractors little evidence was found of contractors adopting novel strategies to capture special advantage from technology developed by equipment manufacturing firms it is suggested that the changing economic and technological environment is creating a climate where new or closer contractor equipment manufacturer relationships should receive greater attention appropriate alliances between contractors and equipment manufacturers can not only help to reduce plant design procurement and erection costs but also offer a means to counter the competitive threat from more specialist firms in particular the large equipment manufacturers that possess their own project contracting skills furthermore collaboration in niche and technology fusion type innovation offers a means of generating scope for technological competitive advantage whilst sharing cost and risk whilst contractor equipment manufacturer alliances are one option the nature of the market demands operating company involvement to facilitate commercialisation

do supermajority rules limit or enhance majority tyranny evidence from the us states 1960 1997 buchanan and tullock 1962 demonstrates that supermajority rules can reduce tyranny of majority problems in a democracy however recent theoretical work by dixit grossman and gul 2000 postulates that this static analysis of supermajority rules may be inadequate to explain political decisions in a dynamic setting in fact supermajority rules may increase the incidence of majority tyranny because of rotating political representation using data from us state legislatures we examine the effect of supermajority rules on different categories of government expenditures and tax revenues during the latter half of the 20th century we find supermajority rules have little effect on general government expenditures and tax revenues however supermajority rules are associated with lower public welfare transfers which supports the traditional analysis of the fiscal effects of supermajority rules

the corporate social performance financial performance link strategic managers are consistently faced with the decision of how to allocate scarce corporate resources in an environment that is placing more and more pressures on them recent scholarship in strategic management suggests that many of these pressures come directly from sources associated with social issues in management rather than traditional arenas of strategic management using a greatly improved source of data on corporate social performance this paper reports the results of a rigorous study of the empirical linkages between financial and social performance corporate social performance csp is found to be positively associated with prior financial performance supporting the theory that slack resource availability and csp are positively related csp is also found to be positively associated with future financial performance supporting the theory that good management and csp are positively related 1997 by john wiley sons ltd