Alles ist gut

All is good — wisdom’s use in managementIn crisis periods the demand for orientation knowledge grows. Everybody is looking for the answers to the fundamental questions of life. For over 2000 years philosophy has such a knowledge: wisdom. But what is wisdom and what is its use for the management? On this question the essay with Kant gives the answer: Wisdom is the way of self-knowledge. And self-knowledge is the very source of each vision, without which there is no successful entrepreneurship.     

Johann Gottfried Herders philosophische Grundlegung der Iernenden Organisation

Herder’s philosophical model of the learning organisationThe author describes Johann Gottfried Herder’s education philosophy and his plans for an ?alternative“ school. His ?alternative school concept“ shows how the teacher as supervisor of the learning process should take the individual needs into account and adapt the didactics and methods of teaching to these needs. This practice conforms to the rules of today’s reformed schools. Learning as an extension of subjective experiences and life possibilities requires an open organisational structure, and this is what Herder designed.     

On ranking linear budget sets in terms of freedom of choice

This paper examines how freedom of choice as reflected in an agents opportunity sets can be measured in economic environments where opportunity sets are linear budget sets in the non-negative orthant of the n-dimensional real space. Three axioms, Symmetry, Monotonicity and Invariance of Scaling Effects, are proposed for this purpose and the measure based on volumes of budget sets is characterized. I am grateful to Prasanta K. Pattanaik for his encouragement and fruitful discussions over many years on this and related subjects. The first draft of this paper was written while I was visiting the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. I would like to thank its hospitality. Helpful comments of a referee are gratefully acknowledged.     

Maximum likelihood approach to vote aggregation with variable probabilities

The Condorcet-Kemeny-Young statistical approach to vote aggregation is based on the assumption that voters have the same probability of comparing correctly two alternatives and that this probability is the same for any pair of alternatives. We relax the second part of this assumption by letting the probability of comparing correctly two alternatives be increasing with the distance between two alternatives in the allegedly true ranking. This leads to a rule in which the majority in favor of one alternative against another one is given a larger weight the larger the distance between the two alternatives in the true ranking, i.e., the larger the probability that the voters compare them correctly. This rule is not Condorcet consistent and does not satisfy local independence of irrelevant alternatives. Yet, it is anonymous, neutral, and paretian. It also appears that its performance in selecting the alternative most likely to be the best improves with the rate at which the probability increases.We would like to thank Michel Le Breton for his encouragement to examine this question and for his comments, as well as Philippe De Donder, Jean-Yves Duclos, Stephen Gordon, Cyril Téjédo and an anonymous referee for their comments.     

Living with unfairness: The limits of equal opportunity in a market economy

Equality of opportunity is often presented as a criterion which reconciles egalitarianism with principles of freedom and responsibility. This paper distinguishes between the principle of starting-line equality, which requires that everyones initial opportunities, assessed in relation to what is publicly known ex ante, are equal, and the principle that equal efforts should yield equal ex post rewards. It argues that the first principle is compatible with allocation of resources through markets but, because of the division of knowledge, the second is not. If we want the opportunities which markets give us, we have to accept ex post unfairness. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a workshop on the measurement of freedom at the London School of Economics, and at a conference on non-welfarist issues in normative economics at the University of Caen. I thank participants at those meetings, and particularly Tania Burchardt, Marco Mariotti and Franz Prettenthaler, for comments. My work on this paper was supported by the Leverhulme Trust.     

Measuring freedom of choice: An alternative view of a recent literature

A recent literature has emerged in social choice theory which attributes intrinsic importance to freedom in the evaluation of states of affairs. The literatures philosophical basis lies in Berlins notion of positive liberty. Accordingly, axiomatic measures of availability of choices are developed and the information they convey used for ranking states on the basis of the extent of liberty they offer to individuals. I am grateful to Nancy Cartwright, Dan Hausman and Marco Del Seta for their suggestions to previous drafts of this paper. The usual caveat applies. The support of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics is also acknowledged.     

What are opportunities and why should they be equal?

In order to clarify the concept of equal opportunities we need an accurate definition of opportunity. Opportunities can be defined in terms of qualifying actions through which an agent can achieve an advantageous position. It is concluded that equal opportunities is often used as a catchword in cases when opportunities are not really equal, and no one tries seriously to make them so. In many of these cases it would have been more accurate to speak of open opportunities and procedural justice. These are important enough aspects of social justice, that should be appreciated for what they are, rather than being falsely represented as equal opportunities.Received: 13 April 2001     

The voter who wasn’t there: Referenda,representation and abstention

We analyze single binary-choice voting rules and identify the presence of the No-Show paradox in this simple setting, as a consequence of specific turnout or quorum conditions that are included in actual rules. Since these conditions are meant to ensure a representative outcome, we formalize this concern and reach our main result: no voting rule can ensure representation if abstention is possible, unless restrictive assumptions are made on the preference domain of abstainers. We then focus on the main referendum systems and show that appropriate restrictions do make them compatible with representation. The main purpose of our paper is, however, to provide a tool for referendum design: rather than imposing arbitrary restrictions on the preference domain of non-voters, we recommend instead that a conscious choice be made on how abstention is to be interpreted and that this choice be used to derive the corresponding referendum rule.The idea for this paper started with some jocose but insightful notes written by José João Marques da Silva at the time of the first referendum held in Portugal (1998). When José João passed away in August 2000, ISEG lost a bright, interested and friendly scholar. May we dedicate this paper to his memory. This paper was presented at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society and Economic Science Association, San Diego, CA and a preliminary version was presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society, Paris. We would like to thank Mathew Braham, Moshé Machover, Eric Maskin, Vincent Merlin, Hannu Nurmi, Katri Sieberg, Frank Steffen, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. The usual proviso applies.     

Majority vote following a debate

Voters determine their preferences over alternatives based on cases (or arguments) that are raised in the public debate. Each voter is characterized by a matrix, measuring how much support each case lends to each alternative, and her ranking is additive in cases. We show that the majority vote in such a society can be any function from sets of cases to binary relations over alternatives. A similar result holds for voting with quota in the case of two alternatives.We wish to thank Enriqueta Aragones, Jean-Francois Laslier, Andrew Postlewaite, and David Schmeidler for the comments and discussions. We thank Lada Burde for her help in proofreading.