is approval voting an unmitigated evil a response to brams fishburn and merrill brams fishburn and merrill 1988 contend that the indeterminacy of approval voting av introduced in our paper 1988 is not a vice but a surpassing virtue of av they do not compare the negative versus the positive features of av so their assertion remains a conjecture our response emphasizes the need to determine the costs of av and to evaluate them against any merits moreover by correcting and answering bfm s comments the argument against av becomes much stronger this is because we show that av s region of indeterminacy is quite large it includes most profiles some of the consequences of this instability are that the av outcome can negate the voter s true wishes that the av outcome can be volatile even to minor fluctuations of voter s decisions and that av is one of the most susceptible systems to manipulation by small groups of voters for example small maverick groups could determine the av outcome under specific circumstances av may be appropriate to identify these situations we propose the more accurate name of the unsophisticated voter system

approval voting borda winners and condorcet winners evidence from seven elections we analyze 10 three candidate elections and mock elections conducted under approval voting av using a method developed by falmagne and regenwetter 1996 that allows us to construct a distribution of rank orders from subset choice data the elections were held by the institute of management science the mathematical association of america several professional organizations in britain and the institute of electrical and electronics engineers seven of the 10 elections satisfy the conditions under which the falmagne regenwetter method is suitable for these elections we recreate possible underlying preferences of the electorate on the basis of these distributions of preferences we find strong evidence that av would have selected condorcet winners when they exist and would have always selected the borda winner thus we find that av is not just simple to use but also gives rise to outcomes that well reflect voter preferences our results also have an important implication for the general study of social choice processes they suggest that transitive majority orderings may be expected in real world settings more often then the formal social choice literature suggests in six out of seven data sets we find social welfare orders only one data set generates cycles anywhere in the solution space

the vulnerability of point voting schemes to preference variation and strategic manipulation this essay measures and analyzes for a special class of point voting schemes the borda method plurality rule and the unrestricted point voting scheme sensitivity to preference variation a simple change in the socially winning alternative resulting from alteration of a single voter s preferences and vulnerability to individual strategic manipulation a change in the winning alternative that benefits the voter whose preferences are altered assuming that society n voters with linear preference orders on a finite set of m alternatives satisfies the impartial culture assumption that is each randomly selected voter is equally likely to hold any one of the randomly picked possible preference orders on the alternatives we demonstrate

president perot or fundamentals of voting theory illustrated with the 1992 election different voting systems can lead to different election outcomeseven when voter preferences are held constant using the 1992 election as anexample it is shown how the outcome of every positional votesystem can be found similarly every possible cumulative andapproval vote outcome is shown multiple vote systems likeapproval and cumulative voting have disturbing properties usingthe 1992 election as illustration it is shown how a candidate whowins under every positional vote system who wins every pairwisevote i e is the condorcet winner and who has the most firstplace and least last place votes may nevertheless lose underapproval or cumulative voting similarly it is shown how acandidate who loses under every positional system who loses everypairwise vote i e is the condorcet loser and who has the leastfirst place and most last place votes may nevertheless win underapproval or cumulative voting

strategy proof probabilistic mechanisms in economies with pure public goods abstract public good economies where agents are endowed with strictly convex continuous single peaked preferences on a convex subset of euclidean space are considered such an economy arises for instance in the classical problem of allocating a given budget to finance the provision of several public goods where the agents have monotonically increasing strictly convex continuous preferences a probabilistic mechanism assigns a probability distribution over the feasible alternatives to any profile of reported preferences the main result of the paper establishes that any strategy proof in the sense of a gibbard econometrica 45 1977 665 681 and unanimous mechanism must be a random dictatorship journal of economic literature classification numbers d70 d71 h40 c60

the source of some paradoxes from social choice and probability abstract an elementary argument is developed to explain and unite several paradoxes coming from probability and from social choice this geometric approach is illustrated with new results about the intransitivities of election rankings over subsets of alternatives agenda manipulation conditional probability and waiting times

collective choice under dichotomous preferences abstract agents partition deterministic outcomes into good or bad a mechanism selects a lottery over outcomes time shares the probability of a good outcome is the canonical utility the utilitarian mechanism averages over outcomes with largest approval it is efficient strategyproof anonymous and neutral we reach an impossibility if in addition each agent s utility is at least 1 n where n is the number of agents or is at least the fraction of good to feasible outcomes we conjecture that no ex ante efficient and strategyproof mechanism guarantees a strictly positive utility to all agents and prove a weaker statement

an impossibility result for virtual implementation with status quo in this paper virtual implementation is restricted to deliver on the equilibrium path either a socially optimal outcome or a status quo an outcome fixed for all preference profiles under such a restriction for any unanimous and implementable social choice function there is a dictator who obtains her most preferable outcome as long as all agents prefer this outcome to the status quo further restrictions on the lottery space and the range of social choice functions allow the dictator to impose her most preferred outcome even when other agents prefer the status quo to this outcome

income distribution and price controls targeting a social safety net during economic transition abstract during the ongoing post communist economic transitions the relative well being of many people is changing rapidly and governments are not well positioned to accurately measure individual living standards under such circumstances continued price controls over basic consumer goods within the state sector and the associated queuing can form a serviceable device for targeting poor people for subsidies with a fixed price state sector and free price parallel markets rich people might choose to avoid queues and shop in the free markets while poor people would prefer to pay low nominal prices and queue in the state sector the targeting of subsidies through queues therefore can be accomplished even if the government has no information concerning individual income or living standards when the alternative to price controls is a poorly targeted explicit social safety net the resource cost of queues might be more than offset by an improvement in the targeting of subsidies

the influence of black markets on a queue rationed centrally planned economy abstract in centrally planned economies in which prices are fixed and the rationing mechanism is waiting line queues we show that an equilibrium of waiting times exists we then introduce a black market in which individuals can trade commodities that they have acquired through the official economy an equilibrium of black market prices and waiting times is shown to exist further the economy with a black market is queue efficient however the introduction of black markets is not necessarily a pareto improvement over an economy without black markets even when we allow winners to compensate losers

reform in eastern europe a general equilibrium model with distortions in relative prices and factor markets this paper presents an analysis of reforms using a simple general equilibrium model with production the model illustrates some of the distortions remaining in the eastern european countries as they adopt market oriented policies and it shows that price reforms should take priority if simultaneous reform is not possible specifically the authors examine reforms of relative prices of output goods and liberalization of the capital market the model is solved numerically showing that restrictions on capital mobility should be retained until after price distortions have been removed

a dictionary for voting paradoxes abstract a sonnenschein mantel debreu kind of characterization is found for positional voting procedures namely for n 2 candidates once the voting procedures and a profile are specified the rankings of all possible subsets of candidates are uniquely determined by varying over all profiles one obtains a dictionary of all possible coordinated election outcomes this is done for all positional voting procedures as with excess demand functions anything can happen voting paradoxes can be very complicated only borda s method avoids many paradoxes use of this dictionary is illustrated by significantly extending several well known paradoxes and by obtaining new results about runoff and agenda elections strategic behavior etc

the paradox of grading systems we distinguish between i voting systems in which voters can rank candidates and ii those in which they can grade candidates using two or more grades in approval voting voters can assign two grades only approve 1 or not approve 0 to candidates while two grades rule out a discrepancy between the average grade winners who receive the highest average grade and the superior grade winners who receive more superior grades in pairwise comparisons akin to condorcet winners more than two grades allow it we call this discrepancy between the two kinds of winners the paradox of grading systems which we illustrate with several examples and whose probability we estimate for sincere and strategic voters through a monte carlo simulation we discuss the tradeoff between i allowing more than two grades but risking the paradox and ii precluding the paradox but restricting voters to two grades

the problem of strategic behavior under approval voting approval voting is being promoted as the election reform of the 20th century brams 1980 p 105 and indeed if voters preferences are dichotomous approval voting has some remarkable qualities it is uniquely strategy proof a candidate wins if and only if he is a condorcet winner and voters have simple strategies that are at once sincere and sophisticated however all of these results depend on the existence of dichotomous preferences a contrived and empirically unlikely assumption here i show that these virtues of approval voting are replaced by some rather undesirable features under more plausible assumptions more fundamentally rather than promoting honest behavior as is sometimes implied the existence of multiple sincere strategies almost begs voters to behave strategically i also examine sophisticated approval voting and show that in the general case it need not pick a condorcet alternative ironically there is a condition under which condorcet winners may always be picked but for this to occur voters sometimes have to vote for candidates of whom they disapprove

elasticidade da pobreza em relacao a renda media e a desigualdade no brasil e nas unidades da federacao the paper shows how to compute the elasticities of poverty measures the poors head count ratio sen s poverty index and the measure of foster greer and thorbecke in relation to the mean income and in relation to the gini index g assuming that the income distribution is lognormal analysing how these poverty elasticities vary as functions of and g the elasticities of the poors head count ratio are computed for brazil and its states in 1999 considering the distribution of per capita household income comparing the results with those obtained by marinho and soares 2003 with other methodology the two estimates show very similar patterns of variation between brazilian states the obvious advantage of the method used in this paper is the possibility to compute the elasticities using only the values of and g for an income distribution the elasticities are also computed for 2001 and 2002

the problem of indeterminacy in approval multiple and truncated voting systems it is well known that a plurality election need not reflect the true sentiments of the electorate some of the proposed reform procedures such as approval and cumulative voting share the characteristics that there are several ways to tally each voter s preferences voting systems that permit truncated ballots share this feature it is shown that the election results for any such procedure can be highly indeterminate all possible election results can occur with the same choice of sincere voters this conclusion of indeterminacy holds even when measures of voters sentiments such as the existence of a condorcet winner or even much stronger measures indicate there is considerable agreement among the voters then multiple systems are compared with all standard tallying procedures for instance a corollary asserts it is probable for the plurality voting method to elect the condorcet winner while approval voting has an indeterminate outcome

divided majority and information aggregation theory and experiment this paper studies theoretically and experimentally the properties of plurality and approval voting when a majority gets divided by information imperfections the majority faces two challenges aggregating information to select the best majority candidate and coordinating to defeat the minority candidate under plurality the majority cannot achieve both goals at once under approval voting it can welfare is strictly higher because some voters approve of both majority alternatives in the laboratory we find i strong evidence of strategic voting and ii superiority of approval voting over plurality finally subject behavior suggests the need to study equilibria in asymmetric strategies

the political temptations of rationing by insiders long waits for goods services and jobs to become available still exist in and to the east of europe this paper explores the political economy of what has made pervasive rationing an attractive way to cope with shocks in the past the explanation advanced lies not in the creation of shortage rents for the personal profit of corrupt insiders controlling the production and distribution process instead rationing with queuing is viewed as a populist scheme that allows a majority to keep its wages above levels that would clear the labor market while hiding the cost of such a policy increased unemployment

a new approach to measure tactical voting evidence from the british elections although tactical voting attracts a great deal of attention it is very hard to measure as it requires knowledge of both individuals voting choices as well as their unobserved preferences in this article we present a simple empirical strategy to nonparametrically identify tactical voting patterns directly from balloting results this approach allows us to study the magnitude and direction of strategic voting as well as to verify which information voters and parties take into account to determine marginal constituencies we show that tactical voting played a significant role in the 2010 election mainly for liberal democratic voters supporting labour moreover our results suggest that voters seem to form their expectations based on a national swing in vote shares rather than newspaper guides published in the main media outlets or previous election outcomes we also present some evidence that suggests that campaign spending is not driving tactical voting

strategic manipulation in voting games when lotteries and ties are permitted abstract a gibbard satterthwaite type theorem is established for random decision rules and rules that permit ties the rules use full information on how individuals rank lotteries and sets of outcomes the theorem allows restrictions on the domain of rankings journal of economic literature classification numbers d7 c7

impact of infrastructure expenses in strategic sectors for brazilian poverty abstract this paper analyzes the impact of infrastructure investments in the reduction of poverty in brazil controlled through other determinants such as economic growth income inequality average schooling years unemployment rate and state budgets from 1995 to 2011 a model for a dynamic panel data estimated by the generalized method of moments gmm in two steps as developed by arellano bond 1991 and blundell bond 1998 found among other conclusions a significant inverse relation between public investment in infrastructure and poverty the granger causality test for panel data proposed by hurlin and venet 2001 2004 and hurlin 2004 2005 reinforced results validation

russian voting and the initial economic shock of hyperinflation this paper addresses the issue of economicvoting in transitional democracies using data from the russianfederal elections it argues that the shock of inflation thatfollowed the fundamental economic reform has a lastinginfluence on voters specifically it shows that in russia where inflationary policy led to hyperinflation and thewidespread loss of personal savings the magnitude of savingslost at that time continues to explain a significant portionof the variation in the regional support for the communistparty in parliamentary and presidential elections

susceptibility to manipulation all positional voting procedures can be manipulated so it is natural to question whether some of these systems are more susceptible to being manipulated than others in this essay this susceptibility factor is measured for strategic action involving small groups it is shown that the system least susceptible to micro manipulations for n 3 candidates is the borda count bc the optimal choice changes with n but the analysis shows that the bc always fares fairly well on the other hand the plurality and anti plurality vote as well as multiple voting systems such as approval voting and cumulative voting always fare quite poorly with respect to susceptibility finally it is shown why it is possible to justify any voting method by choosing an appropriate measure of susceptibility and imposing the appropriate assumptions on the profiles of voters this statement emphasizes the importance of the basic assumptions of neutrality used throughout this essay

the impossibility of extending random dictatorship to weak preferences random dictatorship has been characterized as the only social decision scheme that satisfies efficiency and strategyproofness when individual preferences are strict we show that no extension of random dictatorship to weak preferences satisfies these properties even when significantly weakening the required degree of strategyproofness

nonmarket institutions for credit and risk sharing in low income countries the design credit and risk institutions in low income countries provides one of the most exciting testing grounds for theories of contracting with imperfect information and limited enforcement this paper reviews some of the recent literature with a special focus on nonmarket institutions that cope with risk and provide credit this literature attempts to bring together insights from economic theory especially information economics contract theory and mechanism design theory however it is also applied being motivated by the circumstance of the poor countries that their authors have visited and studied

an efficiency and welfare classification of rationing by waiting in the presence of bribery abstract governments often allocate commodities at low prices and on a first come first served basis rationing by waiting while bureaucrats who distribute the commodities usually take bribes a model is developed to classify the efficiency implications of bribery and socially optimal pricing schemes in rationing by waiting if the rationed good and individual income spent on other goods other income are complements then bribery may enhance allocative efficiency and a dual pricing scheme can augment social welfare however if the rationed commodity and other income are substitutes then bribery may not improve allocative efficiency and distributing the rationed commodity free is socially optimal

when are local incentive constraints sufficient we study the question of whether local incentive constraints are sufficient to imply full incentive compatibility in a variety of mechanism design settings allowing for probabilistic mechanisms we give a unified approach that covers both continuous and discrete type spaces on many common preference domains including any convex domain of cardinal or ordinal preferences single peaked ordinal preferences and successive single crossing ordinal preferences local incentive compatibility suitably defined implies full incentive compatibility on domains of cardinal preferences that satisfy a strong nonconvexity condition local incentive compatibility is not sufficient our sufficiency results hold for dominant strategy and bayesian nash solution concepts and allow for some interdependence in preferences

is india s economic growth leaving the poor behind there has been much debate about how much india s poor have shared in the economic growth unleashed by economic reforms in the 1990s the authors argue that india has probably maintained its 1980s rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s however there is considerable diversity in performance across states this holds some important clues for understanding why economic growth has not done more for india s poor india s economic growth in the 1990s has not been occurring in the states where it would have the most impact on poverty nationally if not for the sectoral and geographic imbalance of growth the national rate of growth would have generated a rate of poverty reduction that was double india s historical trend rate states with relatively low levels of initial rural development and human capital development were not well suited to reduce poverty in response to economic growth the study s results are consistent with the view that achieving higher aggregate economic growth is only one element of an effective strategy for poverty reduction in india the sectoral and geographic composition of growth is also important as is the need to redress existing inequalities in human resource development and between rural and urban areas

goods diversion and repressed inflation notes on the political economy of price liberalization most analyses of parallel markets in centrally planned systems focus on queue rationing as the mechanism whereby state sector goods become available for second economy resale this article takes into account employee diversion of goods as a second channel through which merchandise can move to private markets diversion of goods tends to temper the adverse distributional consequences of price liberalization as repressed inflation increases more goods are diverted out of the state sector and the likelihood that an individual will be made worse off by a transition of free prices is diminished

measuring changes in poverty a methodological case study of indonesia during an adjustment period analysis of the effects of policy changes on the poor is often hindered by the difficulties inherent in measuring poverty and comparing levels of poverty before and after policy changes this article outlines two techniques which can overcome many of these measurement problems stochastic dominance conditions which can facilitate a robust poverty ranking of distributions of living standards and a decomposable poverty index which allows measured changes in aggregate poverty to be disaggregated into their various components such as the changes among population subgroups and growth and redistributive components these techniques can be applied to a wide range of indicators of economic well being and poverty lines and to assumptions about the poor the approaches are illustrated using household survey data from indonesia before and after external shocks and the subsequent structural adjustment program in the mid 1980s the study finds that favorable initial conditions and pro poor pattern of growth enabled indonesia to maintain its momentum in poverty alleviation during the period

fully sincere voting in a general social choice framework where the requirement of strategy proofness may not be sensible we call a social choice rule fully sincere if it never gives any individual an incentive to vote for a less preferred alternative over a more preferred one and provides an incentive to vote for an alternative if and only if it is preferred to the default option that would result from abstaining if the social choice rule can depend only on the number of votes that each alternative receives those rules satisfying full sincerity are convex combinations of the rule that chooses each alternative with probability equal to the proportion of the vote it receives and an arbitrary rule that ignores voters preferences we note a sense in which the natural probabilistic analog of approval voting is the fully sincere rule that allows voters maximal flexibility in expressing their preferences and gives these preferences maximal weight

the effect of robust growth on poverty a nonlinear analysis previous research has shown that economic growth should help to reduce the rate of poverty however a number of recent studies have found that the economic expansion of the 1980s had no statistically significant effect on aggregate poverty it is shown that both a threshold regression and a fourier approximation provide a better empirical model of poverty than the standard linear model it is noteworthy that the nonlinear specifications show a large and significant effect on poverty of the 1980s expansion

strategic voting equilibria under the single nontransferable vote previous investigations of strategic voting equilibria in mass electorates have looked only at single member districts i shall investigate such equilibria in multimember districts operating under the single nontransferable vote system what appear to be the most natural equilibria conform to the m 1 rule according to which strategic voting in m seat districts produces exactly m 1 vote getting candidates in equilibrium any others having their support totally undercut this result provides the beginnings of a formal underpinning for reed s recent extension of duverger s law to the japanese case the model also generates specific and empirically testable hypotheses concerning the exceptions to the m 1 rule that one ought to expect in equilibrium i test these hypotheses with japanese data finally the model also reveals a type of strategic voting that is specific to multimember districts i use japanese data again to explore the empirical importance of this kind of strategic voting

fan welfare maximization as a club objective in a professional sports league abstract motivated by aspects of european soccer club governance members clubs supporters trusts a first formal analysis of fan welfare maximization as a club objective in a sports league is provided with comparisons to objectives studied previously profit and win maximization positive comparisons focus on team qualities ticket prices attendances and the impact of capacity crowds empirically observed ticket black markets and inelastic pricing are consistent only with fan welfare maximization normatively social welfare aggregate league surplus is well served by a league of fan welfare maximizers or sometimes win maximizers but not profit maximizers leagues should not normally make profits

rationing queues and black markets several types of rationing and queue mechanisms are compared in a framework of general equilibrium type models under gross substitutability and normality assumptions about consumers walrasian demand during transition from rationing and queues to a market system a group of low income people loses the transition involves larger losses for this group if black markets prevail under rationing or queues while a group of high income consumers gains some other comparative statics results are developed for a queue model with black markets copyright 1993 by the econometric society

why have some indian states done better than others at reducing rural poverty the unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of india since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty they modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state level data for 1957 91 they found that poverty was reduced by higher agricultural yields above trend growth in nonfarm output and lower inflation rates but these factors only partly explain relative success and failure in reducing poverty initial conditions also mattered states that started the period with better infrastructure and human resources with more intense irrigation greater literacy and lower infant mortality rates had significantly greater long term rates of consumption growth and poverty reduction by and large the same variables that promoted growth in average consumption also helped reduce poverty the effects on poverty measures were partly redistributive in nature after controlling for inflation the authors found that some of the factors that helped reduce absolute poverty also improved distribution and none of the factors that reduced absolute poverty had adverse impacts on distribution in other words there was no sign of tradeoffs between growth and pro poor distribution

strategy proofness and pivotal voters a direct proof of the gibbard satterthwaite theorem this paper presents a proof of the gibbard satterthwaite theorem the importance of the theorem itself has been widely recognized and there already exist several alternative proofs the present one is offered because it is technically simple direct and emphasizes the role of pivotal individuals in the manipulation of voting schemes some indirect proofs of the theorem rely on the connections between voting schemes and social welfare functions and one interesting corollary of such proofs is to provide new arguments in behalf of arrow s condition of independence of irrelevant alternatives yet a direct proof has the advantage of showing the complete independence of the manipulation phenomena from any requirement of consistency in choice under varying sets of alternatives also our proof emphasizes the role of pivotal individuals in manipulation a classical approach in social choice theory is to concentrate on the global distribution of power among groups of agenits i e on the ability of coalitions to impose outcomes regardless of the preferences of agents not in the coalition for example standard proofs of arrow s theorem concentrate on decisive coalitions to end up proving that there must exist one such coalition containing a single individual the dictator our approach concentrates on the local distribution of power among single agents i e on the ability of each single individual to determine the social outcome given the preferences of all other members of society this approach may be more intuitive for some readers moreover it closely parallels the work on incentives in economic environments with public goods and suggests a possible way to unify results which have been obtained from different initial specifications we do not attempt such a rejoinder here but let us observe the following for certain environments with public goods where transfer payments make perfect sense nontrivial strategy proof mechanisms can be obtained by appropriately taxing pivotal agents so that they take into account the costs that their actions impose upon others 2 one explanation for the nonexistence of equivalent mechanisms in our case is that the environment as specified does not allow for a corresponding procedure whereby different costs to individuals could be attached to different acts of preference revelation

on the theory of strategic voting many analyses of plurality rule elections predict the complete coor dination of strategic voting and hence support for only two candidates here i suggest that stable multi candidate support will arise in equilibrium a group of voters must partially coordinate behind one of two challenging candidates in order to dislodge a disliked incumbent in a departure from existing models the popular support for each challenger is uncertain this support must be inferred from the private observation of informative signals such as the social communication of pref erences throughout the electorate or the imperfect observation of opinion polls the uniquely stable voting equilibrium entails only limited strategic voting and hence incomplete coordination this is due to the surprising presence of negative feed back an increase in the degree of strategic voting by others reduces the incentives for an individual to vote strategically the incentive to vote strategically is lower in relatively marginal elections after controlling for the distance from contention of a trailing preferred challenger a calibration of the model applied to the uk general election of 1997 is consistent with the impact of strategic voting and the reported accuracy of voters understanding of the electoral situation it suggests that nearly 50 seats may have been lost by the conservative party due to strategic voting 1 plurality rule elections and strategic voting 1 1 strategic voting and duverger s law plurality rule elections where the winner is the candidate who receives the largest number of votes are vulnerable to strategic voting a voter might well switch away from her preferred candidate and toward a perceived leader in the hope of exerting a greater influence over the outcome of the election this phenomenon has long been the focus of both economic and political scientific study in an influential essay riker 1982b cited droop s 1871 eloquent exposition of the strategic voting problem 1 i oer my grateful thanks to the many friends colleagues seminar participants referees and editors who have oered insightful comments during the long gestation of this paper its antecedents and companion work special thanks go to steve fisher whose empirical analysis of strategic voting raised many of the questions that i seek to answer in this paper and to chris wallace this particular paper brings together much of the analysis previously circulated in the papers a new theory of strategic voting strategic voting under the qualified majority rule and idiosyncrasy information and the impact of strategic voting

evaluationwise strategy proofness abstract we consider manipulation of collective decision making rules in a framework where voters not only rank candidates but also evaluate them as acceptable or unacceptable in this richer informational setting we adopt a new notion of strategy proofness called evaluationwise strategy proofness where incentives of manipulation exist if and only if a voter can replace an outcome which he finds unacceptable with an acceptable one evaluationwise strategy proofness is weaker than strategy proofness however we establish the prevalence of a logical incompatibility between evaluationwise strategy proofness anonymity and efficiency on the other hand we show possibility results when either anonymity or efficiency is weakened

random matching under dichotomous preferences we consider bilateral matching problems where each person views those on the other side of the market as either acceptable or unacceptable an acceptable mate is preferred to remaining single and the latter to an unacceptable mate all acceptable mates are welfare wise identical using randomization many efficient and fair matching methods define strategyproof revelation mechanisms randomly selecting a priority ordering of the participants is a simple example equalizing as much as possible the probability of getting an acceptable mate across all participants stands out for its normative and incentives properties the profile of probabilities is lorenz dominant and the revelation mechanism is group strategyproof for each side of the market our results apply to the random assignment problem as well

evolution and human nature from an economic perspective on individual decision making human beings have three key characteristics preferences beliefs and rationality beliefs are the probabilities with which people think various outcomes will occur conditional on information that might be available preferences are the rankings over the set of gambles that are based on such beliefs over the outcomes rationality is the extent to which people succeed in choosing optimal actions in the light of their beliefs and preferences and the extent to which their beliefs are appropriately modified by their information economists typically impose only rather weak assumptions on preferences for example preferences are taken to be transitive and sometimes less explicitly exogenous and unchanging stronger assumptions are typically imposed on preferences in specific contexts however for example preferences over time might be represented by an additively separable function with constant rate of discount despite widespread recognition that this case is a special one further attitudes to risk are often represented by the expected utility theorem which rests on assumptions that are strong if also appealing the assumptions made on rationality in particular are usually very strong that is rationality in economic models usually entails the exact optimization of preferences and modification of beliefs in accordance with bayes theorem the economist s basic picture of preferences beliefs and rationality has been subject to challenges from a growing number of empirical anomalies the proposed explanations of these anomalies involve relaxing the assumptions that economists make on these preferences beliefs or rationality for example preferences

crescimento e desigualdade prosperidade versus armadilhas da pobreza no desenvolvimento economico dos estados brasileiros it presents a reflection about the distributive conflict that exists in scenery with social stratification and its eects for the economic development for brazilian states between 1996 and 2001 the theoretical reference links the endogenous growth models driven by externalities with structural elements of the interpretation of the productive transformation with equity the estimatives of dynamic models and simultaneous equations for panel data taken highlights the disparities between the brazilian states these were long term eect on the decelerator economic growth rates a combination of factors that deepens inequalities as real trap

the responsiveness of approval voting comments on saari and van newenhizen saari and van newenhizen 1987 misinterpret their findings about the indeterminacy of voting systems far from being a vice indeterminacy is a virtue in allowing voters to be more responsive to and robbing them of the incentive to misrepresent their preferences the responsiveness of approval voting in particular means that the cardinal utilities that voters have for candidates can be reflected in voters strategy choices which ultimately translate into better social choices empirical data from a recent election support these claims showing among other things that the borda system a determinate voting system favored by saari and van newenhizen is highly vulnerable to manipulation by strategic voters