Equity and effectiveness of optimal taxation in contests under an all-pay auction

The means of contest design may include differential taxation of the prize. This paper considers all-pay auctions under complete information and establishes that, given a revenue-maximizing contest designer who faces a balanced-budget constraint, the optimal taxation scheme corresponding to an all-pay auction is appealing in two senses. First, it ensures extreme equitable final prize valuations. Second, it is effective; it yields total contestants’ efforts that are larger than those obtained under almost any pure-strategy equilibrium of a Tullock-type lottery contest.     

Is diversity in capabilities desirable when adding decision makers?

When the benefit of making a correct decision is sufficiently high, even a slight increase in the probability of making such a decision justifies an increase in the number of decision makers. Applying a standard uncertain dichotomous choice benchmark setting, this study focuses on the relative desirability of two alternatives: adding individuals with capabilities identical to the existing ones and adding identical individuals with mean-preserving capabilities that depend on the states of nature. Our main result establishes that when the group applies the simple majority rule, variability in the capabilities of the new decision makers under the two states of nature, which is commonly observed in various decision-making settings, is less desirable in terms of the probability of making the correct decision.     

The seduction of unreason, the intellectual romance with fascism: From Nietzsche to postmodernism

This essay reviews in detail The Seduction of Unreason, The Intellectual Romance with Fascism: From Nietzsche to Postmodernism by Richard Wolin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).     

Social compromise and social metrics

In the context of constitutional design, a committee of citizens' representatives proposes (social choice) axioms. The outcome should not necessarily be the aggregation rule, or rules, satisfying each of the axioms. Alternative procedures are recommended for aggregating a set of axioms into a single summary axiom. The summary axiom generates a single social decision function when a social metric is applied.     

The Public Perception of Female and Male Violence in Marital Relationships

Most studies dealing with intimate partner violence (IPV) investigate situations where the man is the aggressor. The present study examines the participants’ social perception of IPV and the connection between social perception and the severity of the violent act and its justification when carried out by men against women and vice versa. The research is based on a structured, self-reported anonymous questionnaire answered by 240 participants. The questionnaire examined demographic variables, attitudes toward IPV, the severity of the violent act, and its justification. Findings indicate that violent behavior of women is perceived as more justified than that of men and that men’s violent behavior is perceived as more severe by women than by men, but women’s violent behavior is perceived to be equally severe by men and women. The study raises awareness of the lack of gender boundaries in violence and of gender discrimination against males.     

Religion and Fertility in Western Europe: Trends Across Cohorts in Britain,France and the Netherlands

The role of religion in explaining fertility differences is often overlooked in demographic studies, particularly in Western Europe, where there has been a substantial decline in institutional forms of religious adherence. The current study explores the changing relationships between religion and childbearing in Britain, France and the Netherlands. Using data from the Generations and Gender Programme and the British Household Panel Survey, religious differences in completed fertility and the transition to first birth are explored across cohorts of women. In addition, a longitudinal analysis is employed to examine the influence of religion on subsequent childbearing. Although the secularization paradigm assumes that the influence of religion on individual behavior will diminish over time, it is found that religious affiliation and practice continue to be important determinants of fertility and family formation patterns. However, there is some variation in the relationship between religion and fertility across countries; while in France and the Netherlands fertility gaps by religiosity are either consistent or increasing, in Britain, this gap appears to have narrowed over time. These findings suggest that fertility differences by religion also depend on the particular social context of religious institutions in each country.     

The struggle over migration policy

We analyze the endogenous determination of migration quota, viewing it as an outcome of a two-stage political struggle between two interest groups: those in favor and those against the proposed migration quota. First, we compare the proposed policies of the two interest groups under random behavior of the government, with and without lobbying. We examine the effect of the status quo and government intervention in the proposal of the quota on its nature, assuming that, with and without government intervention, the uncertain approval of the proposal is the outcome of a lobbying contest between the two interest groups.

Partial information on decisional competences and the desirability of the expert rule in uncertain dichotomous choice situations

The paper analyzes the expert resolution problem by employing extended versions of the uncertain dichotomous choice model. The main purpose of this study is to illustrate how the analysis of optimal decision rules can be carried out while dispensing with the common restrictive assumption of full information regarding individual decisional competences. In contrast to most previous studies in this field we here evaluate the expert rule under alternative assumptions regarding the available partial information on judgmental competences rather than compare it in an ad hoc manner to some common alternative rules, such as simple majority rule. A fuller optimality analysis allowing the evaluation of all relevant decision rules, and not merely the expert rule, is attempted for a five-member panel of experts assuming a uniform distribution of individual competences. For three-member groups the optimality issue is resolved by assuming no information on individual competences and interpreting the expert rule as an even-chance lottery on skills.     

The effect of limited search ability on the quality of competitive rent-seeking clubs

A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on the basis of the club-members’ efforts, he selects the winner on the basis of quality. This article focuses on the effect of incomplete search of the selector on the efficiency of democratic self-governing and decentralized RSC’s that control admittance to the club and its transparency, assuming that quality of their members is fixed. The incomplete search of the selector is assumed to take the simple form of fixed random sampling of the contestants—the members of the CRSC. Our results imply that, even when active rent-seeking expenditures are disregarded, the decisions of CRSC’s regarding their composition and transparency tend to reduce quality and are therefore inefficient.