risk aversion and bandwagon effect in the pivotal voter model the empirical literature on the effects of opinion polls on election outcomes has recently found substantial evidence of a bandwagon effect defined as the phenomenon according to which the publication of opinion polls is advantageous to the candidate with the greatest support this result is driven in the lab experiments by a higher turnout rate among the majority than among the minority such evidence is however in stark contrast with the main theoretical model of electoral participation in public choice the pivotal voter model which predicts that the supporters of an underdog candidate participate at a higher rate given the higher probability of casting a pivotal vote this paper tries to reconcile this discrepancy by showing that a bandwagon effect can be generated within the pivotal voter model by concavity in the voters utility function which makes electoral participation more costly for the expected loser supporters given the strict relationship between concavity and risk aversion the paper also establishes the role of risk aversion as a determinant of bandwagon

drivers for the use of materials across countries abstract this paper analyses drivers for resource use and material productivity across countries this is not only relevant in light of soaring raw material prices but also because eu policies such as the thematic strategy on the sustainable use of natural resources com 2005 670 the eu raw materials initiative com 2008 699 and various similar policies internationally seek to better manage materials along their life cycle and across economies in order to better understand the system dynamics of material use our paper applies methodologies of material flow analysis and regression analysis to identify the major drivers for resource use and decoupling from gdp drivers are understood as those factors that exert influence on human activities to use resources a panel data set is taken for the european union for the years 1980 2000 eu 15 and 1992 2000 eu 25 the main drivers of resource use were found to be energy efficiency new dwellings and roads construction activities shortcomings of the methodology are also discussed

metabolic inequality and its impact on efficient contraction and convergence of international material resource use international inequality in material use decreased between 1970 and 2000 inequality stabilized 2000 to 2010 when global growth in material use accelerated material intensity has gained importance in shaping material use inequality inequality in material intensity has increased and shapes global material use

turnout across democracies world democracies widely differ in legislative executive and legal institutions different institutional environments induce different mappings from electoral outcomes to the distribution of power we explore how these mappings affect voters participation in an election we show that the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters preferences we uncover a novel contest effect given the preferences distribution turnout increases and then decreases when we move from a more proportional to a less proportional power sharing system turnout is maximized for an intermediate degree of power sharing moreover we generalize the competition effect common to models of endogenous turnout given the institutional environment turnout increases in the ex ante preferences evenness and more so when the overall system has lower power sharing these results are robust to a wide range of modeling approaches including ethical voter models voter mobilization models and rational voter models

local economic gains from primary election spending this article asks how government and private consumption spending affect earnings in service sectors to do this we exploit the variation across states and time in the money spent while campaigning for a party s presidential primary nomination we create a novel data set combining the date each state held its primary from 1976 to 2008 the date in each election cycle in which only one candidate remained and quarterly state earnings by sector using an instrumental variable strategy we find that hosting a primary election increases earnings particularly in the retail and accommodation sectors these results remain consistent when using data on primary campaign expenditures across states in the 2004 and 2008 elections

signaling and election motivations in a voting model with common values and responsive candidates in this paper we focus on strategic voting behavior when both an election and a signaling motivation affect voters behavior we analyze a model of elections with two candidates competing on a one dimensional policy space voters are privately and imperfectly informed about a common shock affecting the electorate s preferences candidates are assumed to choose policy in response to information gleaned from election results and according to exogenous factors that may lead to polarization in candidates policy choices we analyze a subset of symmetric equilibria in which strategies are symmetric to candidates names and private signals css equilibria we show that signaling and election motivations pull voters to vote in different directions we provide conditions that show the relation between the amount of information aggregated in the election and the motivation that influences voting behavior the most finally we show that when candidates are responsive and polarized all css equilibria are inefficient in the limit

on the consensus effect abstract individuals often tend to conform to the choices of others in group decisions compared to choices made in isolation we show that this behavior which we term the consensus effect is equivalent to a well known violation of expected utility namely strict quasi convexity of preferences which is shared by many popular non expected utility models in contrast to the equilibrium outcome when individuals are expected utility maximizers quasi convexity of preferences imply that group decisions may fail to properly aggregate preferences and strictly pareto dominated equilibria may arise

mandate and paternalism a theory of large elections we propose a game theoretic costly voting model of large elections that incorporates the assumption that mandate matters this innovation is motivated by empirical evidence that us representatives with larger victory margins on average vote in a more partisan manner if voters are paternalistic this new model predicts strictly positive limiting turnout rates as the population grows arbitrarily large the model also preserves stylized comparative statics results of costly voting models including the underdog effect and the competition effect finally we develop an innovative computational strategy to solve the model for large finite electorates and show that our results are not only qualitatively but also quantitatively relevant

rank effects in bargaining evidence from government formation theories of multilateral bargaining and coalition formation applied to legislatures predict that parties seat shares determine their bargaining power we present findings that are difficult to reconcile with this prediction but consistent with a norm prescribing that the most voted party should form the government we first present case studies from several countries and regression discontinuity design based evidence from twenty eight national european parliaments we then focus on 2 898 spanish municipal elections in which two parties tie in the number of seats we find that the party with slightly more general election votes is substantially more likely to appoint the mayor since tied parties should on average have equal bargaining power this identifies the effect of being labeled the most voted this effect is comparable to that of obtaining an additional seat and is also present when a right wing party is the most voted and the second and third most voted parties are allied left wing parties who can form a combined majority a model where elections both aggregate information and discipline incumbents can rationalize our results and yields additional predictions we take to the data such as voters punishing second most voted parties that appoint mayors

analysis on major drivers of cement consumption during the urbanization process in china abstract accompanying by the rapid urbanization process of china unprecedented amounts of cement have been poured into urban construction over the last decade since research is still scarce on the factors underlying the cement consumption the motivation of this paper is to provide insight into cement based socioeconomic metabolism and to improve understanding of the linkage between human activities and cement consumption to explore the key impact factors of cement consumption an extended stirpat model is exploited in this paper to examine the effect of population gross domestic product gdp per capita cement consumption intensity fixed investment and urbanization level with regional panel data of china from 2005 to 2013 the empirical results indicate that fixed investment and gdp per capita are the decisive driving factors of cement consumption the unbalanced investment between infrastructure and people s livelihood reflects bias urbanization policy in china inverted u shaped nexus between cement consumption and urbanization as well as gdp per capita are observed in the empirical results moreover regional heterogeneities are taken into account in the model estimation on the ground of the empirical findings several policy recommendations are provided for policy makers it is suggested that policy makers should take account of the regional discrepancy and implement a sustainable urbanization strategy to curtail cement consumption only when excessive fixed investment is curbed does the enthusiasm of cement consumption calm down

pivots versus signals in elections abstract we consider a two period model of elections in which voters have private information about their policy preferences a first period vote can have two types of consequences it may be pivotal in the first election and it provides a signal that affects candidates positions in the second election pivot events are exceedingly unlikely but when they occur the effect of a single vote is enormous in contrast vote totals always have some signaling effect but the effect of a single vote is small we investigate which effect pivot or signaling drives equilibrium voting behavior in large electorates

why vote for losers voting theory generally concludes that in first past the post elections all votes should go to effective candidates duverger s law and parties should adopt a similar platform median voter theorem however such predictions are not always met in practice we show why divergence and vote dispersion is a natural outcome when a parties are opportunistic b there is uncertainty on the position of the median voter and c elections are repeated voting for losers increases the informational content of elections and may induce mainstream parties to relocate towards extremists as a result to maximize their probability of being elected they do not adopt median

primaries and the new hampshire effect candidates for u s presidential elections are determined through sequential elections in single states the primaries we develop a model in which candidates can influence their winning probability in electoral districts by spending money on campaigning the equilibrium replicates several stylized facts very well campaigning is very intensive in the first district the outcome of the first election then creates an asymmetry in the candidates incentives to campaign in the next district which endogenously increases the equilibrium probability that the first winner wins in further districts on the normative side our model oers a possible explanation for the sequential organization it leads in expectation to a lower level of advertising expenditures than simultaneous elections moreover if one of the candidates is the more eective campaigner sequential elections also perform better with regard to the selection of the best candidate

momentum and social learning in presidential primaries this paper investigates social learning in sequential voting systems in the econometric model candidates experience momentum effects when their performance in early states exceeds expectations the empirical application uses daily polling data from the 2004 presidential primary we find that kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from dean owing to these momentum effects early voters had up to five times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates and this helps to explain the distribution of advertising expenditures finally we use the estimated model to conduct two counterfactual experiments

turkey s energy efficiency assessment white certificates systems and their applicability in turkey abstract the last decade has seen an increase in the importance of energy efficiency and the sustainable use of energy resources due to their significant benefits for reducing a country s dependence on foreign energy resources and increasing awareness on environmental problems turkey aims to reduce its energy intensity by 20 up to 2023 and in order to accomplish this target the country plans to use energy more effectively in various industries and develop financial mechanisms for energy efficiency although much effort has been made to improve energy efficiency additional policies such as marked based incentives are still necessary this article deals with one of the many market based energy efficiency policies called tradable white certificates whc or energy efficiency obligations the current situation of the energy field in turkey and energy consumption by industries is presented first in this paper followed by potentials for energy efficiency in each industry and energy efficiency policies furthermore the theory and applicability of a whc system is introduced and discussed in terms of market conditions choice of obligated participants and market mechanisms and barriers for the turkish electricity and natural gas market to benefit from the residential and industrial energy savings potential

pathways to a resource efficient and low carbon europe abstract various environmental footprint concepts have already been developed and applied in sustainability research however these analyses tend to remain restricted to historical observation samples at least in comparison with related research activities in other environmental policy domains like e g climate policy it seems that applications of integrated assessment tools represent rather seldom exceptions within the resource policy domain our paper is therefore intended to strengthen the related evidence base we present recent projections from the dynamic multi region input output mrio simulation model ginfors global inter industry forecasting system which provide an outlook on global development trends until the year 2050 our detailed material footprint and climate policy assessment indicates that a global agreement on a policy mix will allow a clear turnaround towards climate protection and a sustainable use of natural resources without deteriorating economic performance if the eu decides unilaterally to lead the way then this turnaround could also be achieved for the eu while the eu would also benefit economically from this pioneering role a third pathway towards a resource efficient and low carbon europe quantifies the environmental and economic impacts of a strong transitional change induced by european citizens commitments to far reaching sufficiency objectives

social security and retirement an international comparison this article concerns the following items 1 decline in labour force participation 2 social security benefit accrual and the implicit tax on work 3 the importance of the early retirement age 4 the implicit tax on work and labour force participation etc

information aggregation rationality and the condorcet jury theorem the condorcet jury theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the better of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote sincerely in the collective decision making a seemingly innocuous assumption given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative however in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference in particular sincere voting does not constitute a nash equilibrium a satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably do better than individuals therefore has yet to be derived

analysing future trends of renewable electricity in the eu in a low carbon context the aim of this paper is to analyse the situation and trends of electricity from renewable energy sources res e in the eu up to 2030 taking into account several drivers and barriers and different maturity levels for the renewable energy technologies the methodology is based on the results of simulation models providing insights on future outlooks complemented with an analysis of regulations and other drivers and barriers regarding the most mature renewable electricity technologies the main drivers will be public policies carbon prices and support schemes and the expected up ward trend in fossil fuel prices and the main barriers are related to grid access administrative procedures and the exhaustion of places with the best wind resource for those already commercial but expensive technologies the main driver is support schemes but not carbon prices allowing the exploitation of the large potential for investment cost reductions barriers are mostly related to their high investment costs finally for those technologies which are emerging and immature further technical improvements as a result of r d efforts will be needed and they cannot be expected to significantly penetrate the european electricity market until 2030

sequential aggregation of verifiable information we introduce the notion of verifiable information into a model of sequential debate among experts who are motivated by career concerns we show that self censorship may hamper the eciency of information agg regation as experts withhold evidence contradicting the conventional wisdom in this case silence is telling and undermines the prevailing view over time if this view is incorrect as a result withholding arguments about the correct state of the world is only a temporary phenomenon and the probability of the correct state of the world being revealed always converges to one as the group of experts becomes large for small groups a simple mechanism the principal can use to improve decisionmaking is to appoint a devil s advocate

the case for nil votes voter behavior under asymmetric information in compulsory and voluntary voting systems in an informational voting environment we study the impact of an explicit nil vote option on the ballot when some voters are uninformed and face the swing voters curse we postulate a simple model of strategic voting in which voters entertain heterogeneous thresholds on legitimacy of different voting actions we predict that introducing a nil vote option reduces the number of uninformed and invalid votes increasing expected welfare in both voluntary and compulsory voting we test our model in a pen and paper laboratory experiment and find that the predictions of the model hold in the data for both voting systems

backcasting sustainable freight transport systems for europe in 2050 european freight transport emissions and fuel consumption are projected to increase this study focuses on long distance freight transport ldft and explores possible sustainable futures through quantitative modeling the evaluation was part of european foresight process between researchers policy makers and freight companies freightvision greenhouse gas ghg emissions and energy demand of road rail and inland waterways were estimated for an eu 27 in 2005 development was extrapolated to 2050 based on technology and freight performance forecasts stakeholders found the forecasted ghg emissions and fossil fuel share unsustainable so alternative futures were developed with backcasting the developed emission model was run with random parameter combinations to screen a set of sustainable futures with an 80 reduction of ghg emissions and fossil fuel share freight transport performance was not controlled in the backcasts but several sustainable futures were found if significant changes in transport efficiency and energy mix are implemented in spite of agreeing on the importance of reducing emissions stakeholders had difficulties in choosing a preferred technological future simple models were found to be an effective tool for communicating the influence of various measures further research is recommended to screen preferable technological roadmaps from the broad range of available futures

communication and learning we study strategic information transmission in an organization consisting of an infinite sequence of individual decision makers each decision maker chooses an action and receives an informative but imperfect signal of the once and for all realization of an unobserved state the state affects all individuals preferences over present and future decisions decision makers do not directly observe the realized signals or actions of their predecessors instead they must rely on cheap talk messages in order to accumulate information about the state each decision maker is therefore both a receiver of information with respect to his decision and a sender with respect to all future decisions we show that if preferences are not perfectly aligned full learning equilibria ones in which the individuals posterior beliefs eventually place full weight on the true state do not exist this is so both in the case of private communication in which each individual only hears the message of his immediate predecessor and in the case of public communication in which a decision maker hears the message of all his predecessors surprisingly in the latter case full learning may be impossible even in the limit as all members of the organization become perfectly patient we also consider the case where all individuals have access to a mediator who can work across time periods arbitrarily far apart in this case full learning equilibria exist copyright 2012 oxford university press

key drivers for unsustainable resource use categories effects and policy pointers abstract prevailing resource use patterns of the global socio industrial metabolism are unsustainable an increasing number of people globally require ever more materials including energy carriers land and water for rising living standards and lifestyles converging towards western industrialised patterns therefore these resources will continue becoming both scarcer and depleted while environmental impacts associated with their consumption e g run away climate change will continue to rise for effective resource policies drivers for such unsustainable resource use and their effects need to be better understood and mapped by means of meta analysis of more than 60 sources of relevant literature we identified a set of ten driver categories that affect unsustainable resource use inter alia prevailing consumption and production patterns use and design of infrastructure and technology underlying paradigms and world views resource prices and the level of knowledge and information of resource users cumulative effects of the drivers contribute for instance up to 30 of phosphorus loss from soil and around 30 of building energy loss globally although the data does not allow clear cut causal attribution of effects it enables the distinction between direct and indirect drivers in relation to a multi dimensional network of drivers causing unsustainable resource use resource policy should combine policy objectives and instruments into policy mixes to target key drivers and their interrelations while policy mixes need to respond to context specific driver settings targeting consumer behaviour emerges as a general driver focus of policy mixes combining different instrument types and implementing them in a time dynamic sequence can mitigate trade offs between different instruments and in the longer term increase feasibility of profound behaviour changes

voting behavior and information aggregation in elections with private information we analyze two candidate elections in which voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters each voter has noisy private information about the state variable we show that the fraction of voters whose vote depends on their private information goes to zero as the size of the electorate goes to infinity nevertheless elections fully aggregate information in the sense that the chosen candidate would not change if all private information were common knowledge equilibrium voting behavior is to a large extent determined by the electoral rule i e if a candidate is required to get at least x percent of the vote in order to win the election then in equilibrium this candidate gets very close to x percent of the vote with probability close to one finally if the distribution from which preferences are drawn is uncertain then elections will generally not satisfy full information equivalence and the fraction of voters who take informative action does not converge to zero

social security and economic integration this letter analyzes the impact of economic integration on capital accumulation and capital flows when countries differ in their social security systems funding and early retirement both foster capital accumulation relative to pay as you go pensions with flexible retirement when economies integrate both imply capital outflow possibly resulting in utility losses

social interactions in voting behavior distinguishing between strategic voting and the bandwagon effect prior studies of strategic voting in multi party elections potentially overestimate the extent of it by counting erroneously votes cast under different motivations as strategic votes we propose a method that corrects some of this overestimation by distinguishing between strategic voting voting for a candidate other than the most preferred one to reduce the likelihood of an election victory by a third candidate that is disliked even more and the votes cast under the bandwagon effect voting for the expected winner instead of the most preferred party to conform to the majority or to be on the winning side our method follows from the observation that a vote cannot be strategic unless the voter believes that it will affect the outcome of the election with a non zero probability while a vote cast under the bandwagon effect requires no such belief employing survey data that include the respondent s assessment of the importance of his vote we illustrate this method by estimating the extent of strategic voting in the 2005 uk general election the estimated extent of strategic voting 4 22 is strictly less than self reported strategic voting 6 94 but the discrepancy cannot be attributed in a statistically significant way to the bandwagon effect suggesting that motivations other than those identified in the literature may be at work

empirical estimates of the direct rebound effect a review beginning with william stanley jevons in 1865 a number of authors have claimed that economically justified energy efficiency improvements will increase rather than reduce energy consumption jevons paradox is extremely difficult to test empirically but could have profound implications for energy and climate policy this paper summarises and critiques the arguments and evidence that have been cited in support of jevons paradox focusing in particular on the work of len brookes and harry saunders it identifies some empirical and theoretical weaknesses in these arguments highlights the questions they raise for economic orthodoxy and points to some interesting parallels between these arguments and those used by the biophysical school of ecological economics while the evidence in favour of jevons paradox is far from conclusive it does suggest that economy wide rebound effects are larger than is conventionally assumed and that energy plays a more important role in driving productivity improvements and economic growth than is conventionally assumed 2008 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

manipulated electorates and information aggregation we study information aggregation with a biased election organizer who recruits voters at some cost voters are symmetric ex ante and prefer policy a in state a and policy b in state b but the organizer prefers policy a regardless of the state each recruited voter observes a private signal that is imperfectly informative about the unknown state but does not learn the size of the electorate in contrast to existing results for large elections there are equilibria in which information aggregation fails as the voter recruitment cost disappears a perfectly informed organizer can ensure that policy a is implemented independent of the state by appropriately choosing the number of recruited voters in each state

candidate competition and voter learning in the 2000 2012 us presidential primaries when candidates in primary elections are ideologically differentiated e g conservatives and moderates in the republican party then candidates with similar positions affect each others vote shares more strongly than candidates with different ideological positions we measure this effect in us presidential primaries and show that it is of first order importance we also show that voters beliefs about the candidates harden over the course of the primary as manifested in the variability of candidate vote shares we discuss models of sequential voting that cannot yield that pattern of results and propose an explanation based on a model with horizontally and vertically differentiated candidates and incompletely informed voters consistent with the predictions of this model we also show that in more conservative states low quality conservative candidates do better relative to high quality conservatives and vice versa

growth in global materials use gdp and population during the 20th century the growing industrial metabolism is a major driver of global environmental change we present an assessment of the global use of materials since the beginning of the 20th century based on the conceptual and methodological principles of material flow accounting mfa on the grounds of published statistical data data compilations and estimation procedures for material flows not covered by international statistical sources we compiled a quantitative estimate of annual global extraction of biomass fossil energy carriers metal ores industrial minerals and construction minerals for the period 1900 to 2005 this period covers important phases of global industrialisation and economic growth the paper analyses the observed changes in the overall size and composition of global material flows in relation to the global economy population growth and primary energy consumption we show that during the last century global materials use increased 8 fold humanity currently uses almost 60 billion tons gt of materials per year in particular the period after wwii was characterized by rapid physical growth driven by both population and economic growth within this period there was a shift from the dominance of renewable biomass towards mineral materials materials use increased at a slower pace than the global economy but faster than world population as a consequence material intensity i e the amount of materials required per unit of gdp declined while materials use per capita doubled from 4 6 to 10 3 t cap yr the main material groups show different trajectories while biomass use hardly keeps up with population growth the mineral fractions grow at a rapid pace we show that increases in material productivity are mostly due to the slow growth of biomass use while they are much less pronounced for the mineral fractions so far there is no evidence that growth of global materials use is slowing down or might eventually decline and our results indicate that an increase in material productivity is a general feature of economic development

coordination focal points and voting in strategic situations a natural experiment this paper studies coordination in a multi stage elimination tournament with large monetary incentives and a diversified subject pool drawn from the adult british population in the tournament members of an ad hoc team earn money by answering general knowledge questions and then eliminate one contestant by plurality voting without prior communication we find that in the early rounds of the tournament contestants use a focal principle and coordinate on one of the multiple nash equilibria in pure strategies by eliminating the weakest member of the team however in the later rounds contestants switch to playing a mixed strategy nash equilibrium

public information and electoral bias abstract we present a theory of voting that predicts that elections are more likely to be close and voter turnout is more likely to be high when citizens possess better public information about the composition of the electorate these findings suggest that providing more information to potential voters about aggregate political preferences e g through pre election polls or expert forecasts may undermine the democratic process our analysis reveals that if the distribution of political preferences is common knowledge then the unique type symmetric equilibrium leads to a stark neutrality result in which each alternative is equally likely to win the election by contrast when citizens are ignorant about the preference distribution the majority is more likely to win the election and expected voter turnout is lower welfare is therefore unambiguously higher when citizens possess less information about the preference distribution

learning and coordination in the presidential primary system in elections with three or more candidates coordination among like minded voters is an important problem we analyze the trade off between coordination and learning about candidate quality under different temporal election systems in the context of the u s presidential primary system in our model candidates with different policy positions and qualities compete for the nomination and voters are uncertain about the candidates valence this setup generates two effects vote splitting i e several candidates in the same policy position compete for the same voter pool and voter learning as the results in earlier elections help voters to update their beliefs on candidate quality sequential voting minimizes vote splitting in late districts but voters may coordinate on a low quality candidate using the parameter estimates obtained from all the democratic and republican presidential primaries during 2000 2012 we conduct policy experiments such as replacing the current system with a simultaneous system adopting the reform proposal of the national association of secretaries of state or imposing party rules that lead to candidate withdrawal when pre specified conditions are met

the swing voter s curse with adversarial preferences abstract we analyze voting behavior in a large electorate in which voters have adversarial state contingent preferences with incomplete information about the state of the world we show that one type of voter can suffer from the swing voter s curse a la feddersen and pesendorfer the swing voter s curse amer econ rev 86 1996 408 424 and go on to characterize the symmetric nash equilibria of this model under different parameter values we prove that unlike settings with nonadversarial preferences there are equilibria in which in one state of the world a minority preferred candidate almost surely wins the election and thus the election may fail to correctly aggregate information indeed we show that the fraction of the electorate dissatisfied with the result can be as large as 66 2 3

economic growth sustainable development and food consumption evidence across different income groups of countries abstract considering that high population and income growths will lead the coming decades an increase in global food demand is expected livestock products such as meat are closely related to this trend but also associated with impacts on the environment and public health from land and water depletion to greenhouse gases emissions and higher risks of non communicable diseases this trend raises doubts about the sustainability of the food industry and thus a solution is needed for the problem how to feed the world population without compromising present and future generations the literature suggests that meat consumption should be reduced for the sake of the environment and global population however without considering the effects that such reduction would have on the economy inspired by these facts this paper empirically analyses the interactions between food consumption economic growth and sustainable development measured by the index of sustainable economic welfare more specifically the paper assesses the effect that food consumption has on the economy the econometric analysis applies the autoregressive distributed lag model for 77 countries further distinguished by their income group from 1995 to 2013 the findings support that meat consumption has different impacts on economic growth and sustainable development considering different income groups however there is an evident dilemma between economic growth and sustainable development since meat consumption has contradictory effects on each thus it is crucial to understand how to promote sustainability i e reducing the environmental externalities and chronic health diseases without compromising economic growth

sequential or simultaneous elections a welfare analysis sequential or simultaneous this paper addresses a key question on the design of electoral systems should all voters vote on the same day or should elections be staggered with late voters observing early returns before making their decisions using a model of voting and social learning we illustrate that sequential elections place too much weight on the preferences and information of early states but also provide late voters with valuable information under simultaneous elections voters equally weigh the available information but place too much weight on their priors providing an inappropriate advantage to front runners given these trade offs simultaneous elections are welfare preferred if the front runner initially has a small advantage but sequential elections are welfare preferred if the front runner initially has a large advantage we then quantitatively evaluate this trade off using data based on the 2004 presidential primary the results suggest that simultaneous systems outperform sequential systems although the difference in welfare is relatively small

technological progress and sustainable development what about the rebound effect abstract sustainability concepts that rest on the idea of resource or energy efficiency improvements due to technological progress tend to overestimate the potential saving effects because they frequently ignore the behavioral responses evoked by technological improvements efficiency improvements also affect the demand for resources and energy and often an increase in efficiency by 1 will cause a reduction in resource use that is far below 1 or sometimes it can even cause an increase in resource use this phenomenon is commonly labeled the rebound effect which is well known among energy economists but never attracted much attention in ecological economics the paper starts with the traditional neoclassical analysis of the rebound effect in a partial equilibrium framework that concentrates on the demand of one particular energy service such as mobility or room temperature it also provides an overview of some of the main empirical studies based on this model that mostly confirm the existence of the rebound effect but are controversial about its actual importance however we have to go beyond the neoclassical single service model in order to take care of the variety of possible feedback affecting energy use the paper presents two important expansions of the single service model in order to show the potential relevance of the rebound effect to ecological economics first it is shown that in a multi services model it proves to be difficult to make general statements about the relevance of the rebound effect in this case the overall effect of an increase in energy efficiency on total energy use depends on the on the assumptions about the substitutability between the services considered and the direction of the income effect second the paper also tries to take care of the fact that changes in resource use or energy use are frequently just side effects of other forms of technological progress especially technological change of a time saving nature can have a large influence on energy use as many time saving devices for example faster modes of transport require an increase in energy consumption that is frequently reinforced by a rebound effect with respect to time this effect will be especially strong when wages are high and at the same time energy prices are low as is currently the case in most industrialized countries consequently the paper also provides a strong argument for the introduction of energy taxes

pandering and electoral competition abstract we study an election with two perfectly informed candidates voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them voters elect one of the candidates effectively choosing between the two policies proposed by the candidates we explore under which conditions candidates always propose the voters optimal policy the model is extended to include strategic voting policy motivated candidates imperfectly informed candidates and heterogeneous preferences

backward induction in the wild evidence from sequential voting in the us senate in the us senate roll calls are held in alphabetical order we document that senators early in the order are less likely to vote with the majority of their own party than those whose last name places them at the end of the alphabet to speak to the mechanism behind this result we develop a simple model of sequential voting in which forward looking senators rely on backward induction in order to free ride on their colleagues estimating our model structurally we find that this form of strategic behavior is an important part of equilibrium play we also consider but ultimately dismiss alternative explanations related to learning about common values and vote buying

do polls create momentum in political competition abstract we explore how public opinion polls affect candidates campaign spending in political competition generally polls lead to more asymmetric behavior under a majority rule there always exists an equilibrium in which the initially more popular candidate invests more in the campaign and thereby increases her lead in expectation polls create momentum when campaigning is very effective and the race is very close a second type of equilibrium may exist the trailing candidate outspends and overtakes his opponent regardless of the type of equilibrium polls have a tendency to decrease expected total campaigning expenditures by amplifying ex ante asymmetries between candidates and thus defusing competition when candidates care also for their vote share in addition to having the majority candidates incentives crucially depend on the distribution of voters candidate preferences

driving forces for aggregate energy consumption a cross country approach abstract although a cornerstone for development past and current energy use has often posed a major challenge for policymakers with respect to planning and management within this context in this paper an updated multi sectorial cross country assessment of energy consumption trends was undertaken aiming at identifying the main drivers of changes in aggregate energy consumption these drivers have been interpreted in the light of the policy measures that have been implemented over the years by different countries to achieve a sustainable development of the energy sector the cross country assessment encompasses a set of developed united kingdom portugal and spain and emerging brazil china and india countries resorting to the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi decomposition method changes in the aggregate energy consumption were decomposed into three main explanatory effects activity structure and intensity the major findings achieved reflect the relevance of intensity and activity effects in detriment of the structural effect the assessment of energy consumption trends using the lmdi decomposition method provides critical information regarding which is the dominant factor that should be focused in policy design

a unified analysis of rational voting with private values and group specific costs we provide a unified analysis of the canonical rational voting model with privately known political preferences and costs of voting focusing on type symmetric equilibrium we show that for small electorates members of the minority group vote with a strictly higher probability than do those in the majority but the majority is strictly more likely to win the election as the electorate size grows without bound equilibrium outcome is completely determined by the individuals possessing the lowest cost of voting in each political group we relate our equilibrium characterization to myerson s poisson games and examine the potential uniqueness of equilibrium

global patterns of materials use a socioeconomic and geophysical analysis abstract human use of materials is a major driver of global environmental change the links between materials use and economic development are central to the challenge of decoupling of materials use and economic growth dematerialization this article presents a new global material flow dataset compiled for the year 2000 covering 175 countries including both extraction and trade flows and comprising four major material categories biomass construction minerals fossil energy carriers and ores industrial minerals first we quantify the variability and distributional inequality gini coefficients in international material consumption we then measure the influence of the drivers population gdp land area and climate this analysis yields international income elasticities of material use finally we examine the coupling between material flows and between income and material productivity measured in economic production per tonne material consumed material productivity is strongly coupled to income and may thus not be suitable as an international indicator of environmental progress a finding which we relate to the economic inelasticity of material consumption the results demonstrate striking differences between the material groups biomass is the most equitably distributed resource economically the most inelastic and is not correlated to any of the mineral materials the three mineral material groups are closely coupled to each other and economic activity indicating that the challenge of dematerializing industrial economies may require fundamental structural transformation our analysis provides a first systematic investigation of international differences in material use and their drivers and thus serves as the basis for more detailed future work

information aggregation in standing and ad hoc committees this paper reports results from a laboratory experiment comparing voting behavior and decision making efficiency in standing and ad hoc committees where decisions are made by unanimity rule we also compare sequential and simultaneous secret ballot voting procedures the data are remarkably consistent across treatments in both qualitative comparative statics and quantitative terms the different procedures and the ad hoc or standing nature of the committees generally do not seem to lead to the selection of different equilibria with the exception of some evidence of bandwagon effects in the sequential procedure

ossified materialism introduction to the special volume on absolute reductions in materials throughput and emissions drawing from papers in this special volume sv this introductory paper on absolute reductions argues that the magnitude scope and urgency of the sustainability challenge require a drastic change in global civilisation including a radical transformation of the institutional arrangements and socio technical systems that facilitate the pursuit of wellbeing the authors of this paper identify four main challenges to absolute reductions including the resource intensive conventional template for development macroeconomic structures and trade policies creating burden shifting and inequality a resourceefficiency improvements fallacy and the dominant consumerist culture and lifestyles the paper demonstrates

voting as communicating mandates multiple candidates and the signaling voter s curse abstract in this spatial model of common value elections votes convey citizens private opinions regarding which policies are socially optimal and the winning candidate utilizes this information in choosing policy in equilibrium large margins of victory convey mandates for candidates to make bold policy changes to communicate extreme policy views citizens support extreme parties that may be unlikely to win office to convey moderate views citizens deliberately abstain from voting thereby avoiding the signaling voter s curse of encouraging overextremism in large elections mandates can identify the optimal policy from an entire continuum thereby greatly strengthening condorcet s 1785 classic jury theorem behavioral patterns are consistent with otherwise puzzling empirical features of elections and can also apply to other political activities such as public protests or writing letters to elected officials

bandwagons and momentum in sequential voting in this paper i show that an equilibrium exists to the sequential voting game in which a bandwagon begins with probability 1 these bandwagons are driven by a combination of beliefs and the desire of voters to vote for the winning candidate significantly in this equilibrium the pivot probability for each voter is non zero even in an infinite population consequently the bandwagons do not always start after one or at most two favourable decisions as do economic cascades and varying levels of informative voting are observed consistent with observations from sequential voting in u s presidential primaries further voters are exposed to counterintuitive incentives referred to as buyers remorse that have been attributed to real primary voters i also derive equilibrium behaviour in this environment when voting is simultaneous and compare the quality of information aggregation within each mechanism i relate the conclusions to u s presidential primaries and find they are consistent with a common conclusion about the front loading of the primary process that in tight elections with no front runner simultaneous voting is preferred whereas in lopsided elections sequential voting is preferred the superior performance of sequential voting in lopsided races is precisely because bandwagons occur copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

voting as communicating this paper develops a model where voters trade off two different motives when deciding how to vote they care about current decision making they are strategic but they also care about communicating their views about their most preferred candidate so as to influence future elections by influencing other voters opinion and or party positioning in effect voters in this model are intermediate between strategic and sincere voters of conventional models in elections with more than 2 candidates this allows us to better investigate the relative efficiency of various electoral systems our main conclusion is that since voting is used as a communication device electoral systems should be designed to facilitate efficient communication e g by opting for 2 round systems rather than 1 round systems

overconfidence in political behavior this paper studies theoretically and empirically the role of overconfidence in political behavior our model of overconfidence in beliefs predicts that overconfidence leads to ideological extremeness increased voter turnout and stronger partisan identification the model also makes nuanced predictions about the patterns of ideology in society these predictions are tested using unique data that measure the overconfidence and standard political characteristics of a nationwide sample of over 3 000 adults our numerous predictions find strong support in these data in particular we document that overconfidence is a substantively and statistically important predictor of ideological extremeness voter turnout and partisan identification jel c83 d03 d72 d83

optimal voting rules we study dominant strategy incentive compatible dic and deterministic mechanisms in a social choice setting with several alternatives the agents are privately informed about their preferences and have single crossing utility functions monetary transfers are not feasible we use an equivalence between deterministic dic mechanisms and generalized median voter schemes to construct the constrained efficient optimal mechanism for an utilitarian planner optimal schemes for other welfare criteria such as say a rawlsian maximin can be analogously obtained

from custer to thermopylae last stand behavior in multi stage contests abstract in a multi stage contest known as a two player race players display two fundamental behaviors 1 the laggard will make a last stand in order to avoid the cost of losing and 2 the player who is ahead will defend his lead if it is threatened last stand behavior in particular contrasts with previous research where the underdog simply gives up the distinctive results are achieved by introducing losing penalties and discounting into the racing environment this framework permits the momentum effect typically ascribed to the winner of early stages to be more thoroughly examined i study the likelihood that the underdog will catch up i find that neck and neck races are common when the losing penalty is large relative to the winning prize while landslide victories occur when the prize is relatively large closed form solutions are given for the case where players have a common winning prize and losing penalty

the marginal voter s curse an intuitive explanation for voter abstention is that a voter is uncertain which policy or candidate to vote for and so defers to the rest of the electorate to make the decision in majoritarian elections this has been formally modelled as a strategic response to the swing voter s curse which arises because the rare event of a pivotal vote conveys substantial information in electoral systems other than majority rule however the standard pivotal voting calculus may not apply this paper analyzes one such system namely proportional representation where additional votes continue to push the policy outcome in one direction or the other a new strategic incentive for abstention arises in that case to avoid the marginal voter s curse of pushing the policy outcome in the wrong direction intuitively conditioning on the rare event of a pivotal vote might seem to have a greater impact on behavior but the marginal voter s curse actually presents a larger disincentive for voting than the swing voter s curse this and other predictions of the model are con rmed empirically by a series of laboratory experiments

information aggregation in polls we study information transmission via polling a policymaker polls constitu ents who differ in their information and ideology to determine policy full rev elation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample but not with a large one in large polls full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists who respond truth fully and extremists who do not we find polling statistics that ignore strate gic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the polvs margin of error we construct estimators that account for strategic behavior finally we compare polls and elections jel c42 d83

sequential voting in large elections with multiple candidates abstract i analyze strategic voting incentives in large elections with three candidates when voting takes place sequentially voters have perfect information about their private preferences but do not know the distribution from which other voters preferences are drawn if a candidate finishes last in an early voting round voters deduce that this candidate is likely to be less popular amongst the remaining voters and the remaining voters almost always have an incentive to stop voting for this candidate by contrast sincere voting equilibria can exist under either simultaneous voting or an early voting round of sequential voting without knife edge assumptions

industrial symbiosis and the policy instruments of sustainable consumption and production abstract industrial symbioses iss and eco industrial parks eips are key concepts of industrial ecology ie the aim of iss and eips is to minimise inefficient material and energy use by utilising local by product and energy flows industrial symbioses tend to develop through spontaneous action of economic actors for gaining of economic benefit but these systems can be designed and promoted via policy instruments as well a literature review showed that national programmes for eco industrial parks can be found in different parts of the world in the action programmes and other sustainable consumption and production scp policy documents of the eu on the other hand industrial symbioses gain less recognition as a path to enhanced sustainable production in this article we consider this and also analyse how the evolution and environmental performance of an industrial symbiosis system centred on a finnish pulp and paper mill have been affected by scp policy instruments with regard to the system forming the subject of the case study and finnish industrial systems in general policy instruments have succeeded in reducing emissions but not in systematically encouraging operators toward symbiosis like activities all in all few studies exist on the overall impact of policy instruments promoting design of eco industrial parks it is not self evident that symbiosis like production systems would be sustainable in every case as the background assumptions for political promotion of eips suggest we concluded that industrial symbioses should be analysed and developed on a life cycle basis with documentation of the real environmental benefits due to efficient resource use and decreased emissions in comparison to standalone production iss can then bring eco competitiveness to companies in relation to scp tools such as environmental permits ecolabels and future product regulation based on the ecodesign directive in europe indirect encouragement of symbiosis through land use regulation and planning in such a way that material fluxes between companies are possible both in operations and in financial terms may prove effective the same holds for waste policies that encourage increased reuse of a company s waste by other enterprises

polling games and information revelation in the downsian framework abstract we investigate the incentives faced by poll respondents when candidates use polling data to inform their selection of policy platforms focusing on models with a unidimensional policy space single peaked preferences and two office seeking candidates observing a summary statistic from polls that ask respondents their preferences we find that for most environments honest poll response cannot occur in a perfect bayesian equilibrium however simple partially revealing equilibria exist when the poll only asks respondents which party or candidate they prefer when the candidates learn the sample average or see all the data there are partially revealing equilibria that mimic those of the binary message game interpretation of polling data requires knowledge of the equilibrium played as the meanings of poll responses are endogenously determined the analysis suggests that naive use of polling data may be misleading

social insurance competition between bismarck and beveridge social insurance schemes differ according to the relationship between contributions and benefits bismarckian systems provide earnings related benefits while beveridgean systems offer flat payments the conventional wisdom is that with factor mobility poor people have incentives to move towards beveridgean countries consequently beveridgean regimes would not be sustainable under economic integration this paper studies the validity of such a conjecture within a simple model it is shown that mobility does have a significant impact on social protection however the equilibrium patterns that can emerge are more complex and diversified than the initial conjecture suggests in some cases the equilibrium may even imply that all the poor move to the bismarckian country

sincere voting in large elections abstract austen smith and banks 1996 showed that sincere informative voting is not typically an equilibrium of the condorcet voting model when the size of the electorate is large here we reverse their finding by adding a third type of voter one that receives no information in favor of either of the alternatives as well as global uncertainty about the probability that each voter is such a no evidence type the expected number of no evidence type voters can be arbitrarily small nevertheless if the electorate is large enough then each of the two standard condorcet types votes sincerely in every nondegenerate type symmetric equilibrium

the sufficiency strategy would rich world frugality lower environmental impact abstract one alleged weapon against unsustainable environmental impact is for the wealthy to consume less this sufficiency strategy is to complement the efficiency strategy of lowering ratios of resource inputs to economic outputs the former would reduce the affluence factor in i pat the latter the technology factor that the latter strategy suffers from a consumption rebound is widely recognized this paper identifies a similar rebound when the affluence factor is autonomously lowered the lower initial demand lowers prices which in turn stimulates new demand by others the strategy moreover addresses only the rich raising questions of its theoretical maximum efficacy its proponents usually conflate frugality with the north south dichotomy and intra generational with inter generational equity moreover there are difficulties with the supporting arguments that frugality is good for one s own sake as well as for the environment and that the rich should lead the way to living more lightly personal behaviour change is furthermore not a substitute for international political efforts finally since all changes in right side factors of the i pat equation change other right side factors such indirect attacks on impact should be abandoned in favor of supply and emissions quotas