the strategy proof provision of public goods under congestion and crowding preferences we examine the strategy proof provision of excludable public goods when agents care not only about the level of provision of a public good but also the number of consumers we show that on such domains strategy proof and efficient social choice functions satisfying an outsider independence condition must be rigid in that they must always assign a fixed number of consumers regardless of individual desires to participate the fixed number depends on the attitudes of agents regarding group size being small when congestion effects dominate individuals prefer to have fewer other consumers and large when cost sharing effects dominate agents prefer to have more consumers a hierarchical rule selects which consumers participate and a variation of a generalized median rule to selects the level of the public good under heterogeneity in agents views on the optimal number of consumers strategy proof efficient and outsider independent social choice functions are much more limited and in an important case must be dictatorial

networks and clubs abstract we formulate a club model where players have identical single peaked preferences over club sizes as a network formation game for situations with many clubs we provide necessary and sufficient for non emptiness of the farsighted core and the direct or myopic core with too few clubs if players are farsighted then the farsighted core is empty in this same case if players are myopic then the direct core is always nonempty and for any club network in the direct core clubs are of nearly equal size i e clubs differ in size by at most one member

understanding heterogeneous preferences in random utility models a latent class approach a finite mixture approach toconditional logit models is developed in whichlatent classes are used to promoteunderstanding of systematic heterogeneity the model is applied to wilderness recreationin which a branded choice experiment involvingchoice of one park from a demand system wasadministered to a sample of recreationists the basis of membership in the classes orsegments in the sample involved attitudinalmeasures of motivations for taking a trip aswell as their stated preferences overwilderness park attributes the econometricanalysis suggested that four classes of peopleexist in the sample using the model toexamine welfare measures of some hypotheticalpolicy changes identified markedly differentwelfare effects than the standard singlesegment model and provided insight into thedifferential impact of alternative policies

sustainable consumption within a sustainable economy beyond green growth and green economies abstract in 1992 one unambiguous result of the unced conference was the need for changing consumption and production patterns with affluent countries taking the lead 20 years later at the 2012 uncsd little is left over and instead the green economy has been the theme pursued by the oecd the eu and other countries so the question needs to be answered if this is finally an attempt to put into practice what was promised 20 years ago or another diversion from what needs to be accomplished sustainable development is still a convincing concept if the original definition is taken avoiding the confusion caused by partisan interests reinterpreting the concept focussing on human needs fulfilment and respecting environmental limits it can still guide strong sustainable consumption green economy green growth on the other hand is a new terminology for what is known since 40 years as ecological modernisation it is indeed overdue but with its focus on efficiency and innovation it cannot guarantee to fulfil the brundtland sustainability criteria a factor analysis based on the i p a t formula demonstrates how optimistic the assumptions regarding future technologies must be to support the green growth concept consequently the authors pledge for a pragmatic risk avoiding approach by slimming the physical size of the economy this requires strong sustainable consumption including production as resource consumption which in turn requires a change of the societies institutional settings formal and informal mechanisms and orientations finally some elements of a strategy towards this end are pointed out with special emphasis on the role of non governmental organisations ngos through networking and advocacy they can both stimulate bottom up action and mobilise the pressure necessary for the institutional changes which are needed to mainstream strong sustainable consumption

competition in political and economic markets do anomalies play an important role in explaining economic and political choices are political decisions more prone to anomalies irrationality and inefficiency than economic decisions in their integration of results derived from experimental psychology and applied political economy frey and eichenberger 1990 argue that social scientists ought to answer these questions in the affirmative after examining a large body of choice data frey and eichenberger conclude that individuals deviate from the axioms of rational choice in their view the resultant anomalies in individual behavior are unaffected by the aggregation which occurs in the economic marketplace they conclude that political decision making systems correct no larger a proportion of these anomalies than are corrected by the economic market in many institutional settings outlined in their paper decision making systems can be expected to magnify individuals deviations from rational behavior system wide irrational behavior will then produce less frequent trading and a less efficient allocation of resources in this note we examine two components of frey and eichenberger s argument first we reconsider their evidence for irrational behavior in light of a larger body of experimental data which includes choices made in market settings second we argue that competition in political markets will tend to eliminate aggregate anomalies just as it does in economic markets experimental economists often generate data which distinguish between choices individuals indicate in unstructured environments and transactions individuals consummate in markets initial statements regarding choices are often inconsistent with subsequent trading behavior these data indicate that the economist s maximization paradigm based on tenets of rational choice is

coalition and party formation in a legislative voting game we examine a legislative voting game where decisions are being made over both ideological and distributive dimensions and legislators preferences are separable over the two dimensions in equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together rather than offering sequential proposals on the two dimensions separately the equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions and in any equilibrium there is a positive probability that a proposal is made and approved which excludes the median legislator as defined over the ideological dimension in contrast with a game where no distributive decision is being made moreover in any stationary equilibrium there is more than one ideological decision that has a positive probability of being proposed and approved we show that legislators can gain from forming political parties and consider examples where predictions can be made about the composition of parties we discuss the impact of political parties on the outcome

willingness to pay for sustainability labelled chocolate an experimental auction approach this study evaluates young consumers attitudes to sustainable food and analyzes the determinants of their willingness to pay wtp for chocolate bars with different sustainability labels data were collected through experimental auctions in italy assessing respondents n 80 aged between 18 and 35 wtp for chocolate bars with three selected labels i e fair trade rainforest alliance and carbon footprint econometric outcomes reveal that several socio demographic factors exert a positive and statistically significant effect on wtp for all the selected chocolate bars namely age cohort older gender female and household income high respondents lifestyles and food consumption habits also had an effect on final bids this study offers valuable insights to policy makers and practitioners for efficiently targeting young consumers in campaigns to increase sustainability labelled food consumption

constitutional rules of exclusion in jurisdiction formation the rules under which jurisdictions nations provinces can deny immigration or expel residents are generally governed by a constitution but there do not exist either positive or normative analyses to suggest what types of exclusion rules are best we stylize this problem by suggesting four constitutional rules of admission free mobility admission by majority vote admission by unanimous consent admission by a demand threshold for public goods in a simple model we characterize the equilibria that result from these rules and provide a positive theory for which constitutional rules will be chosen

marginal contributions and externalities in the value our concern is the extension of the theory of the shapley value to problems involving externalities using the standard axiom systems behind the shapley value for an arbitrary exogenous coalition structure leads to the identification of bounds on players payos around an externality free value in endogenizing the coalition structure we analyze a two stage process of coalition formation in whose second stage our axiomatic results are applied we find reasons to explain inecient coalition structures and provide sucient conditions for eciency

the influence factors on choice behavior regarding green products based on the theory of consumption values abstract this study applies the theory of consumption values to determine the influence factors on consumer choice behavior regarding green products and examines whether there are significant differences in consumption values and choice behavior between consumers with different outlooks on environmental concerns one way analysis of variance and multiple regression is used to assess data collected by a questionnaire survey the results indicate that consumers with high environmental concern support green products more and show greater readiness to choose them this study concludes that the main influence factors on consumer choice behavior regarding green products include psychological benefit desire for knowledge novelty seeking and specific conditions and do not include functional values price and quality this study contributes to preliminary but vital insights in effective promotion of green products

a duopoly game with heterogeneous green supply chains in optimal price and market stability with consumer green preference abstract as environmental problems exponentially rising the necessity of environmental protection and green purchase behavior is addressed by the increasing consumers this paper aims to analyze the effects of consumer green preference on members optimal decisions and the speed of the adjustment of the optimal price strategies for heterogeneous green supply chains the results elaborate that consumer green preference significantly influences the product green level of the manufacturer and the supplier and has intricate effects on the speed of the adjustment of the boundedly rational supply chain which directly affects the social stability the vicious competition and the unbalance market are caused by the overreaction of the boundedly rational and naive supply chain to consumer green preference

capture and ideology in the economic theory of politics the economic theory of regulation long ago put public interest theories of politics to rest these theories have correctly been viewed as normative wishings rather than explanations of real world phenomena they have been replaced by models of political behavior that are consistent with the rest of microeconomics anthony downs 1957 james buchanan and gordon tullock 1965 george stigler 1971 sam peltzman 1976 recently however debate has arisen over whether some version of a public interest theory of regulation will have to be readmitted to our thinking about actions and results in the political arena what is at issue is the empirical importance of the altruistic publicly interested goals of rational actors in determining legislative and regulatory outcomes james kau and paul rubin 1979 kalt 1981 peltzman 1982 this study assesses the nature and significance of publicly interested objectives in a particular instance of economic policymaking u s senate voting on coal strip mining regulations the existence of such objectives is of course no contradiction of the economic view of human behavior kenneth arrow 1972 gary becker 1974 and may well be rooted in genetic biological history becker 1976 jack hirshleifer 1978 generally however individuals altruistic publicly interested goals have been given little attention this reflects the judgment that such goals are so empirically unimportant as to allow the use of occam s razor in positive models or well founded apprehensions that these goals are unusually difficult to identify measure and analyze notwithstanding the latter problem we find that approaches which confine themselves to a view of political actors as narrowly egocentric maximizers explain and predict legislative outcomes poorly the tracking and dissecting of the determinants of voting on coal strip mining policy suggest that the economic theory of politics has been prematurely closed to a broader conception of political behavior

second best taxation as a game second best theory usually lies in the realm of normative analysis it focuses attention on the best solutions which still can be obtained in problems where constraints of various natures forbid the attainment of first best pareto optimal situations its central concern is the characterization of such second best solutions and a large part of the literature concentrates on the optimal design of taxes or of policies of public firms taking a second best problem we try in this paper to shift the emphasis from normative to positive considerations the solution we are interested in is not optimal with respect to some a priori given social welfare function embodying justice objectives but it is supposed to reflect the power of the different agents in a negotiation process clearly the conceptual tools required for such an analysis are to be found in game theory and it is actually a game theoretical approach that we follow here the model we are looking at is presented in section ii it formalizes one of the simplest second best problems that can be imagined we have a twogood economy with one private good and one public good agents have different wealth in private good and the public good is financed through a wealth tax this latter fiscal system is clearly not flexible enough to adjust contributions with marginal willingnesses to pay so that we actually face a second best situation there is one decision variable in the society the tax rate which determines the public good production about which the agents have conflicting desires to this problem we associate a game which provides a precise framework for the analysis of the power of the agents the positive outcomes of the negotiation process are supposed to belong to the core of this game sections iii and iv concentrate on the analysis of the core the results strongly contrast with those obtained in the classical studies of the core of 67 0022 053 l 81 040067 25 02 00 o

the european commission s sustainable consumption and production and sustainable industrial policy action plan abstract the promotion of sustainable consumption and production patterns is enshrined as a key objective in the renewed european union sustainable development strategy eu sds sustainable consumption and production is arguably the most challenging aspect of the eu sds it requires changes to the way products and services are designed produced used and disposed of taking into account producer and consumer behaviours this paper reviews the european commission s communication on the sustainable consumption and production and sustainable industrial policy action plan introduced on july 16 2008 the paper examines the priority areas identified for action the means adopted to improve energy and environmental performance of products as well as uptake by consumers the paper concludes that the absence of mandatory quantifiable targets and deadlines and a reliance on both cross sectoral and multi level relationships are likely to weaken the ability of the action plan s fundamental objective of decoupling economic growth from resource use

voting for voters a model of electoral evolution we model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote we adopt a number of simplifying assumptions the founders and the candidates are fixed the society operates for k periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period one vote is sufficient for admission and voters can support as many candidates as they wish voters assess the value of the streams of agents with whom they share the society while they belong to it in spite of these simplifications we show that interesting strategic behavior is implied by the dynamic structure of the problem the vote for friends may be postponed and it may be advantageous to vote for enemies we discuss the existence of different types of equilibria in pure strategies and point out interesting equilibria in mixed strategies

are choice experiments incentive compatible a test with quality differentiated beef steaks this study compares hypothetical and nonhypothetical responses to choice experiment questions we test for hypothetical bias in a choice experiment involving beef ribeye steaks with differing quality attributes in general hypothetical responses predicted higher probabilities of purchasing beef steaks than nonhypothetical responses thus hypothetical choices overestimate total willingness to pay for beef steaks however marginal willingness to pay for a change in steak quality is in general not statistically different across hypothetical and actual payment settings

towards an understanding of the role of standard setters in standard setting abstract we investigate the effect of standard setters in standard setting we examine how certain professional and political characteristics of fasb members and sec commissioners predict the accounting reliability and relevance of proposed standards notably we find fasb members with backgrounds in financial services are more likely to propose standards that decrease reliability and increase relevance partly due to their tendency to propose fair value methods we find opposite results for fasb members affiliated with the democratic party although only when excluding financial services background as an independent variable jackknife procedures show that results are robust to omitting any individual standard setter

incomplete information and ideological explanations of platform divergence one of the paradoxes of formal spatial voting models is the robustness of the theoretical result that candidates will converge toward centrists positions and the empirical observation of persistent policy divergence of candidates a solution is that candidates are ideological have policy preferences when candidates have policy preferences and incomplete information about voter preferences then platform divergence is theoretically predicted experimental tests of the ideological model are presented it is shown that platform divergence is significant when candidates are ideological and have incomplete information about voter preferences however candidate positions are more convergent on average than the theory predicts suggesting that subjects value winning independently of the expected payment

stability in a network economy the role of institutions abstract we consider an economy in which agents are embedded in a network of potential value generating relationships agents are assumed to be able to participate in three types of economic interactions autarkic self provision bilateral interaction and multilateral collaboration through endogenously provided platforms we introduce two stability concepts and provide sufficient and necessary conditions on the network structure that guarantee existence in cases of the absence of externalities link based externalities and crowding externalities we show that institutional arrangements based on socioeconomic roles and leadership guarantee stability in particular the stability of more complex economic outcomes requires more strict and complex institutional rules to govern economic interactions we investigate strict social hierarchies tiered leadership structures and global market places

ideological conviction and persuasion in the rent seeking society abstract the paper develops a model of rent seeking in a democratic political context where voting as well as rent seeking matters in this context the paper demonstrates that voter ideology is a constraint on the rent seeking game as well as a possible avenue of rent seeking in a setting where there are both rent seeking and ideological interest groups rent seekers can free ride on the efforts of ideologues which tends to reduce rent seeking effort in a setting where complementary economic and ideological interest groups coordinate their efforts both rent seeking and ideological conflict tend to increase

validity of discrete choice experiments evidence for health risk reduction there is growing interest in discrete choice experiment dce as a method to elicit consumers preferences in the health care sector increasingly this method is used to determine willingness to pay wtp for health related goods however its external validity in the health care domain has not been investigated until now this paper examines the external validity of dce concerning the reduction of a health risk convergent validity is examined by comparing the value of a statistical life with other preference elicitation techniques such as revealed preference criterion validity is shown by comparing wtp values derived from stated choices in the experiment with those derived from actual choices made by the same individuals both tests provide strong evidence in favour of external validity of the dce method

national contexts matter the co evolution of sustainability standards in global value chains in this paper we investigate the role of key industry and other stakeholders and their embeddedness in particular national contexts in driving the proliferation and co evolution of sustainability standards based on the case of the global coffee industry we find that institutional conditions and market opportunity structures in consuming countries have been important sources of standards variation for example in the cases of fairtrade utz certified and the common code for the coffee community 4c in turn supplier structures in producing countries as well as their linkages with traders and buyers targeting particular consuming countries have been key mechanisms of standards transmission and selection unlike prior research which has emphasized the role of global actors and structures in promoting and hindering sustainability initiatives we argue that national economic and institutional conditions in consuming and producing countries have not only served as important drivers of standards multiplicity and co evolution but also as catalysts for the entire global sustainability movement

the new economics of organization over the last ten years or so an important new approach to the study of organizations has emerged within economics it is perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a theoretical focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this paper provides political scientists with an overview of the new economics of organization and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy so far positive political theory has not contributed much to our understanding of public bureaucracy in part this is due to the unsympathetic treatment that rational modeling and most other modes of quantitative analysis have long received from students of public administration the other side of the coin however is that positive theorists have not made much of an effort to develop theories of bureaucracy their concerns have centered around two basic mechanisms of social choice voting and markets and they have devoted little systematic attention to a third mechanism that is clearly important for understanding how societies and other aggregates make collective decisions this third and relatively unexplored mechanism is hierarchy movement toward a positive theory of hierarchies would fill a serious gap in the social choice literature while at the same time making a theoretical contribution that strikes to the essence of public bureaucracy indeed of all organizations in fact significant steps toward a positive theory of hierarchies have very recently been taken but by economists not political scientists in small numbers of course economists made contributions to the study of public bureaucracy some time ago with the pioneering works of downs 1967 tullock 1965 and niskanen 1971 but this new wave of theoretical work is different it is already a large complex body of literature that is the focus of innovation and excitement among a growing number of economists and it reflects an unusual degree of theoretical coherence and cumulative effort work in this tradition tends to receive orientation from a distinctive economic approach to the analysis of organizations an approach perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this approach has emerged from recent attempts to move beyond the neoclassical theory of the firm which assumes away all organizational considerations to a theory of economic organizations that can explain why firms corporations and other enterprises behave as they do propo

the bunch of sustainability labels do consumers differentiate abstract a huge number of sustainable labels addressing the different pillars of sustainability emerged over the last years some labels promote factors which already imply other sustainability issues e g organic incl animal friendliness to a certain extent hence the question arises how consumers react towards the redundancies of different sustainability labels to add to the literature this study applies a latent class model for discrete choices first to test whether consumers take different sustainable labels into account when making their decision and second to test how consumers deal with different sustainable labels that are partly claiming the same aspect results indicate that three consumer segments with well distinguished preferences and willingness to pay measures for the respective attributes can be identified one group being the price sensitives exclusively deciding on the product with the lowest price regardless of any sustainable attribute of the product another group opts for products with a sustainable label without any clear preference for a specific sustainable attribute but expressing a clear willingness to pay more for all presented sustainable labels i e the label choosers a third group can be named price conscious label discriminators for them some sustainable aspects provide negative utility when labelled exclusively e g organic or free of genetically modified organisms but labelled together e g organic together with free of genetically modified organisms or animal welfare it provides them significantly positive utility even though being redundant by definition based on our findings there is no general statement to be made regarding the question whether different sustainable aspects complement or substitute each other the research rather emphasizes that a differentiated look at different consumer types and different labels symbolizing sustainability is needed the research adds to the existing literature by examining not only the relevance and acceptance of different sustainable labels to different consumer segments but also the interrelationship of different sustainable labels the study clearly shows that with regard to different sustainable labels the more the merrier does not always apply however almost 85 of the market could be satisfied with a universal sustainability label

coalitions agreements and efficiency if agents negotiate openly and form coalitions can they reach efficient agreements we address this issue within a class of coalition formation games with externalities where agents preferences depend solely on the coalition structures they are associated with we derive ray and vohra s 1997 notion of equilibrium binding agreements using von neumann and morgenstern abstract stable set and then extend it to allow for arbitrary coalitional deviations as opposed to nested deviations assumed originally we show that while the new notion facilitates the attainment of efficient agreements inefficient agreements can nevertheless arise

coalition formation as a dynamic process abstract we study coalition formation as an ongoing dynamic process with payoffs generated as coalitions form disintegrate or regroup a process of coalition formation pcf is an equilibrium if a coalitional move to some other state can be justified by the expectation of higher future value compared to inaction this future value in turn is endogenous it depends on coalitional movements at each node we study existence of equilibrium pcfs we connect deterministic equilibrium pcfs with unique absorbing state to the core and equilibrium pcfs with multiple absorbing states to the largest consistent set in addition we study cyclical as well as stochastic equilibrium pcfs

does affirmative action reduce gender discrimination and enhance efficiency new experimental evidence we investigate experimentally the impact of quota policies on gender discrimination in hiring decisions by testing whether affirmative action increases female employment we also ask whether firm performance is affected by such policies our experiment consists of three treatments in the baseline no quota treatment groups of two employers and six potential job candidates are formed employers have to hire two workers based on information on candidate characteristics including gender and years and subject of study the second low penalty treatment is identical to the baseline except there is a quota such that at least half of the employees hired must be women if this quota is not respected the firm has to pay a penalty the last high penalty treatment is the same as the low penalty treatment except that the penalty is significantly higher we find that women are ranked unfavorably in the absence of a quota and the introduction of a quota significantly reduces gender discrimination firm performance is not affected by the introduction of quotas

environmentally sustainable household consumption from aggregate environmental pressures to priority fields of action unsustainable consumption patterns of the north or rather of the global affluent consumers class have been identified by agenda 21 as one of the key driving forces behind the unsustainable development however neither accounting based on the system of national accounts sna nor household economics provide the proper instruments to assess the environmental impact of household decision making eco efficiency assessments as familiar in the business sector provide no appropriate tool for households as an alternative an environmental space based assessment scheme is suggested covering the major pressures on the environment caused by household decisions the methodology is used twice once to analyse the environmental relevance of the main activity clusters of household consumption and once to identify the dominant acts of consumption within each cluster the latter provide the basis for deriving environmental performance indicators a rough analysis of household influence potentials permits to identify housing eating and mobility as the three priority fields for action for minimising the environmental impact of households extending the influence analysis actor matrixes are derived allocating influence and thus responsibility for environmental pressures to different groups of economic agents

locating public facilities by majority stability consistency and group formation abstract we consider the following allocation problem a fixed number of public facilities must be located on a line society is composed of n agents who must be allocated to one and only one of these facilities agents have single peaked preferences over the possible location of the facilities they are assigned to and do not care about the location of the rest of facilities there is no congestion we show that there exist social choice correspondences that choose locations and assign agents to them in such a way that 1 these decisions are condorcet winners whenever one exists 2 the majority of the users of each facility supports the choice of its location and 3 no agent wishes to become a user of another facility even if that could induce a change of its present location by majority voting

meritocracy egalitarianism and the stability of majoritarian organizations we gratefully acknowledge support from the severo ochoa programme for centres of excellence in r d sev 2011 0075 barbera and bevia acknowledge support from grants consolidated group c eco2008 04756 and feder and sgr2014 515 ponsati acknowledges support from grants eco2012 37065 and sgr2009 1142

stochastic stability for roommate markets we show that for any roommate market the set of stochastically stable matchings coincides with the set of absorbing matchings this implies that whenever the core is non empty e g for marriage markets a matching is in the core if and only if it is stochastically stable i e stochastic stability is a characteristic of the core several solution concepts have been proposed to extend the core to all roommate markets including those with an empty core an important implication of our results is that the set of absorbing matchings is the only solution concept that is core consistent and shares the stochastic stability characteristic with the core

consumers willingness to pay for sustainable food products the case of organically and locally grown almonds in spain abstract organically and locally grown products have positive environmental impacts due to the reduction in the greenhouse emissions required for their production this paper contributes to this research stream by investigating consumers preferences and their willingness to pay for almonds that have different sustainable labels distance claims 100 km 800 km and 2000 km and the organic logo established by the european union to achieve the objective consumers participated in a non hypothetical choice experiment latent class modeling was employed to identify distinct patterns of valuation the results suggest that consumers were willing to pay a positive price premium for locally grown traveled the shortest distance and organically produced almonds whereas they were not willing to pay a price premium for almonds that have traveled longer distances moreover the findings show that consumer preferences for these claims were heterogeneous with three consumer segments identified as conventional consumers short distance consumers and sustainable consumers overall results confirm the results of previous studies because spanish consumers were willing to pay a premium price for those almonds that are organically and locally produced and therefore generate fewer greenhouse gases emissions the findings of this study added scientific value to scholars of sustainable consumer behavior because of the use of real choice experiment since no hypothetical evaluation method simulates real markets with real products and a transaction of money real choice experiment provides better approximations of true willingness to pay for organic and local almonds therefore real choice modeling eliminates hypothetical and social bias the results of this study contribute to insights in the promotion of sustainable consumption among citizens by policy makers in this regard promotional and educational campaigns could drive different segments of consumers to increase their knowledge on the benefits of reduction of the quantity of ghg emissions required for organic and locally grown production

strong tiebout equilibrium under restricted preferences domain abstract we investigate the existence and give a partial characterization of a strong tiebout equilibrium which consists of an endogenously formed partition of the individuals into disjoint jurisdictions with each jurisdiction producing and financing its own public goods and moreover there exists no group of individuals who can all benefit by establishing their own community in particular no single individual finds it desirable to migrate from his equilibrium jurisdiction the existence proof makes use of the notion of consecutive games which we introduce and show that for such games there always exists a partition with a nonempty core

sustainability labels on food products consumer motivation understanding and use this study investigates the relationship between consumer motivation understanding and use of sustainability labels on food products both environmental and ethical labels which are increasingly appearing on food products data was collected by means of an online survey implemented in the uk france germany spain sweden and poland with a total sample size of 4408 respondents respondents expressed medium high to high levels of concern with sustainability issues at the general level but lower levels of concern in the context of concrete food product choices understanding of the concept of sustainability was limited but understanding of four selected labels fair trade rainforest alliance carbon footprint and animal welfare was better as some of them seem to be self explanatory the results indicated a low level of use no matter whether use was measured as self reported use of different types of information available on food labels or as use inferred from the results of a choice based conjoint analysis hierarchical regression indicated that use is related to both motivation and understanding and that both motivation understanding and use are affected by demographic characteristics human values as measured by the schwartz value domains and country differences the results imply that sustainability labels currently do not play a major role in consumers food choices and future use of these labels will depend on the extent to which consumers general concern about sustainability can be turned into actual behaviour

coalition formation in non democracies we study the formation of a ruling coalition in non democratic societies where institutions do not enable political commitments each individual is endowed with a level of political power the ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of resources a ruling coalition needs to contain enough powerful members to win against any alternative coalition that may challenge it and it needs to be self enforcing in the sense that none of its subcoalitions should be able to secede and become the new ruling coalition we present both an axiomatic approach that captures these notions and determines a generically unique ruling coalition and the analysis of a dynamic game of coalition formation that encompasses these ideas we establish that the subgame perfect equilibria of the coalition formation game coincide with the set of ruling coalitions resulting from the axiomatic approach a key insight of our analysis is that a coalition is made self enforcing by the failure of its winning subcoalitions to be self enforcing this is most simply illustrated by the following example with majority rule two person coalitions are generically not self enforcing and consequently three person coalitions are self enforcing unless one player is disproportionately powerful we also characterize the structure of ruling coalitions for example we determine the conditions under which ruling coalitions are robust to small changes in the distribution of power and when they are fragile we also show that when the distribution of power across individuals is relatively equal and there is majoritarian voting only certain sizes of coalitions e g with majority rule coalitions of size 1 3 7 15 etc can be the ruling coalition copyright 2008 wiley blackwell

games of social interactions with local and global externalities abstract in this paper we present a result on the existence of pure strategies nash equilibrium which covers a large class of games with local and global social interactions the result highlights common features of well known games analyzed in the literature

pareto optimality in coalition formation abstract a minimal requirement on allocative efficiency in the social sciences is pareto optimality in this paper we identify a close structural connection between pareto optimality and perfection that has various algorithmic consequences for coalition formation based on this insight we formulate the preference refinement algorithm pra which computes an individually rational and pareto optimal outcome in hedonic coalition formation games our approach also leads to various results for specific classes of hedonic games in particular we show that computing and verifying pareto optimal partitions in general hedonic games anonymous games three cyclic games room roommate games and b hedonic games is intractable while both problems are tractable for roommate games w hedonic games and house allocation with existing tenants

the influence on congress by the thrift industry abstract the investigation of the influential role of the thrift industry on congress as demonstrated by voting behavior on regulatory policy changes in the eighties is the focus of this study specifically we search for the degree to which the inadequately capitalized component of the thrift industry has captured the house of representatives we examine the influence on congress by the thrift industry using the votes by the house of representatives associated with three different legislative acts the garn st germain act the competitive equality banking act and the financial institutions reform recovery and enforcement act addressing the thrift crisis using a multi chotomous voting model we identify traditional public choice variables that could influence the probability of voting for legislation to capture the variation of the thrifts interests we consider a series of financial variables motivated by the thrift literature of failure prediction models these variables allow us to investigate the influences from the health of the congressional district s thrifts their asset composition characteristics and their reliance on regulatory forbearance

economic engineering and the design of matching markets the contributions of alvin e roth alvin roth s research on and design of new economic systems has had a wide and large impact on human welfare from the matching of residents to medical programs to the assignment of students to schools to the manner in which kidneys are allocated to patients needing transplants this article discusses his important contributions to the understanding and improvement of matching markets highlighting roth s key roles in some of the most prominent successes of market design and the ascension of economic engineering

when do people exploit moral wiggle room an experimental analysis of information avoidance in a market setup abstract we investigate if decision makers avoid information to exploit moral wiggle room in green market settings we therefore implement a laboratory experiment in which subjects purchase products associated with externalities in six between subjects treatments we alter the availability of information on the externalities the price of revealing information as well as the nature of the externality which could either affect another subject or change the amount spent by the experimenters on carbon offsets we find that subjects do not strategically avoid information when revealing information is costless when a very small cost of revealing information is introduced their behavior depends on the relation between prices and externalities in situations in which it is relatively cheap to have a large impact on the recipient s payoff subjects avoid information in order to choose selfishly for other parameterizations subjects behave either honestly egoistically or altruistically

groups collective decisions and markets abstract we consider a general equilibrium model where multi member households make efficient collective consumption decisions and operate in a competitive market environment individuals have the option to leave the household and make it on their own or join another household we study the effect of these outside options on household formation household stability and equilibrium existence

the stability of hedonic coalition structures we consider the partitioning of a society into coalitions in purely hedonic settings i e where each player s payoff is completely determined by the identity of other members of her coalition we first discuss how hedonic and nonhedonic settings differ and some sufficient conditions for the existence of core stable coalition partitions in hedonic settings we then focus on a weaker stability condition individual stability where no player can benefit from moving to another coalition while not hurting the members of that new coalition we show that if coalitions can be ordered according to some characteristic over which players have single peaked preferences or where players have symmetric and additively separable preferences then there exists an individually stable coalition partition examples show that without these conditions individually stable coalition partitions may not exist we also discuss some other stability concepts and the incompatibility of stability with other normative properties journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 a14 d20

non binding linked issues referenda analysis and an application non binding referenda petitions are an instrument of direct democracy that allows citizens to signal preferences to politicians outside the electoral cycle this paper provides a simple theoretical and empirical analysis of a particular form of non binding referenda so called linked issues petitions it analyzes the ability of issue linkage to increase participation levels above those of single issue petitions and applies the analytical insights to a controversial referendum held in austria in 2002 that linked issues of transboundary nuclear risk and eastern enlargement of the european union

stable coalition structures with a unidimensional set of alternatives abstract we identify a class of economic and political environments that admit an s equilibrium where both free mobility and free entry are allowed we further study the relationship between the set of s equilibria and the sets of strong and coalition proof nash equilibria in the noncooperative coalition formation game which is closely related to the one originally studied by j von neumann and o morgenstern theory of games and economic behaviour princeton univ press princeton nj 1944 we also show that the set of s equilibria induces a proper subset of the coalition structure core of the corresponding characteristic function form journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72

separating economic from political influences on government decisions abstract the public interest theory is a poor predictor of government decisions relative to interest group theories but a sophisticated public interest theory is a more serious alternative to the former testing the sophisticated theory s predictions is problematic however when public interest is coincident with an interest group s interests a four step method is developed that disentangles public interest and interest group interests by separating economic from political incentives applying the method to the national forest service decisions about wilderness designations indicates whether interest groups were successful in influencing allocation decisions and whether allocation decisions were in the public interest

campaign war chests as a barrier to entry in congressional races i introduction issues surrounding the nature and degree of competition in political races have been examined extensively in both the economic and political science literature with most attention focused on the interplay between incumbent and challenger expenditures and electoral success this study extends our understanding of political competition by investigating the impact of an incumbent s war chest on a challenger s decision to mount a campaign 1 for this purpose a war chest is defined as a pool of unencumbered funds accumulated prior to the start of a campaign for elective office 2 sorauf 1988 182 has observed that early receipts even without early spending discourage competition in the primary and attractive challengers in the general election jacobson 1985 26 has argued the most effective strategy for keeping a seat in congress is to avoid serious opposition contemporary critics and reformers of campaign financing practices use such words as frighten intimidate and overpower to describe the role of an incumbent s war chest 3 despite this kind of attention little is actually known about the degree to which war chests diminish entry or reduce the quality of a challenge we present three alternative mechanisms to explain how an incumbent s war chest might deter entry each is based upon a war chest serving as a credible commitment to spend heavily if challenged specifically war chests may either represent excess capacity in financing a campaign or serve as a signal of non observable incumbent characteristics that define a formidable opponent aside from determining whether an incumbent is challenged a war chest might also affect the quality of the challenger for example potential candidates with prior political experience may be unwilling to risk their political capital on a long shot proposition to test for these effects on entry into house races a trichotomous logit model is estimated the choices are uncontested race contested by an ordinary challenger and contested by an experienced challenger although the empirical model is not sufficiently rich to fully distinguish among competing mechanisms the regression results are robust incumbent war chests negatively affect the likelihood of a contested race and the quality of the challenger ii war chests as a barrier to entry becker 1958 106 in comparing economic and political competition observed i n an ideal political democracy competition is free in the sense that no appreciable costs or artificial barriers prevent an individual from running for office in the theory of the firm entry occurs when the expected postentry stream of profits minus the cost of entry is positive analogously an individual will enter a political race when the expected gain from holding office is positive expected gain as defined by baron 1989 is a function of campaign costs the probability of winning and the personal valuation placed by the candidate on the office the first two determinants are partly endogenous depending upon the strategic interplay of the candidates the third aside from its direct effects indirectly affects the first two for example persons hungry for office may be committed to expending greater effort and funds on their campaigns thus increasing their probability of winning similarly as lott has emphasized nontransferable brand name capital would be another factor creating a commitment to aggressively pursue office thereby affecting campaign costs and the probability of winning 4 that some challengers are deterred however need not imply the existence of a political market failure in a contestability sense the lack of a viable challenger on the ballot does not imply a lack of competition good representation will discourage entry similarly the fact that some incumbents will aggressively seek re election frightening away potential challengers is not a sign that competition is lacking