‘One and a Half Dimensional’ Preferences and Majority Rule

I examine a model of majority rule in which alternatives are described by two characteristics: (1) their position in a standard, left-right dimension, and (2) their position in a good-bad dimension, over which voters have identical preferences. I show that when voters’ preferences are single-peaked and concave over the first dimension, majority rule is transitive, and the majority’s preferences are identical to the median voter’s. Thus, Black’s (The theory of committees and elections, 1958) theorem extends to such a “one and a half” dimensional framework. Meanwhile, another well-known result of majority rule, Downs’ (An economic theory of democracy, 1957) electoral competition model, does not extend to the framework. The condition that preferences can be represented in a one-and-a-half-dimensional framework is strictly weaker than the condition that preferences be single-peaked and symmetric. The condition is strictly stronger than the condition that preferences be order-restricted, as defined by Rothstein (Soc Choice Welf 7:331–342;1990).     

Parties with Policy Preferences and Uncertainty over Voter Behavior

The equilibrium redistributive policy proposals of two parties with policy preferences are studied. Each party’s ideal policy coincides with that of citizens having a particular income level, and the party’s utility function reflects its attitude to the trade-off between the choice of preferred policy and the likelihood of victory. When parties face uncertainty about citizens’ abstention from voting, divergent equilibrium proposals are derived which are more moderate than their contrasting ideal policies. Political equilibria under different prior beliefs on abstention are then compared. It is shown that a lower likelihood of abstention in a particular income group induces both parties to make proposals catering to that group, in equilibrium.An erratum to this article can be found at     

Parents’ Health and Adult Children’s Subsequent Working Status: A Perspective of Intergenerational Transfer and Time Allocation

This paper frames how parents’ health problems may affect a child’s subsequent working status. Parental health problems occurring in their prime working years undermine an adult child’s resources and tend to affect the child’s preferences over time-allocations among leisure, market- and non-market-labor. Empirical applications in this paper focus on a situation with pervasive health problems, lack of social safety network, and a substantial gender gap in labor market return. Exploiting Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) for the period 1994–2004, empirical results indicate that a father’s poor health status is a significant predictor of lowering a daughter’s educational attainment and working probability during her subsequent, adulthood years.     

Axiomatic foundations for fairness-motivated preferences

Much work in social choice theory takes individual preferences as uninvestigated inputs into aggregation functions designed to reflect considerations of fairness. Advances in experimental and behavioural economics show that fairness can also be an important motivation in the preferences of individuals themselves. A proper characterisation of how fairness concerns enter such preferences can enrich the informational basis of many social choice exercises. This paper proposes axiomatic foundations for individual fairness-motivated preferences that cover most of the models developed to rationalise observed behaviour in experiments. These models fall into two classes: Outcome-based models, which see preferences as defined only over distributive outcomes, and context-dependent models, which allow rankings over distributive outcomes to change systematically with non-outcome factors. I accommodate outcome-based and context-sensitive fairness concerns by modelling fairness-motivated preferences as a reference-dependent preference structure. I first present a set of axioms and two theorems that generate commonly used outcome-based models as special cases. I then generalise the axiomatic basis to allow for reference-dependence, and derive a simple functional form in which the weight on each person’s payoff depends on a reference vector of how much each person deserves.     

Utilities,preferences, and substantive goods

 People’s utility levels are meant to be measures of their well-being. Early utilitarians defined them in terms of people’s happiness. Modern economics defines them in terms of people’s actual preferences. But in ethics they have to be defined in terms of people’s informed preferences. I shall discuss the relationship between people’s desires and preferences, and that between their reasoned and unreasoned preferences. I shall argue that people’s basic desires are much the same, whereas their preferences are often very different. Finally, I shall argue, contrary to Scanlon’s theory, that the things that are good for us are beneficial to us ultimately because they satisfy our biological and psychological needs and our personal interests. Received: 8 July 1996     

To the Dark Side and Back: The Administrative Odyssey of an Academic Sociologist with Lessons Learned

My first semester as a tenure-track faculty member at a mid-size university began ignominiously and suggested that my academic career might be short-lived. It began with a blistering memo that was stridently critical of the academic dean’s policy which led to being taken to the proverbial woodshed. Other less serious episodes followed which put me at odds with the “administration.” Yet I have spent more than a third of my career in administrative positions, including a stint in the provost’s office (as an assistant vice chancellor), and only recently returned to faculty status. Over the course of my academic career I have noticed that a large number of academic sociologists have taken administrative positions in academia beyond that of the department chair. This paper will explore this phenomenon and discuss the reasons members of the ‘debunking’ discipline assume administrative roles. I will address this issue within the context of my personal odyssey in administration and how the sociological perspective and imagination has contributed to working in the ‘dark side’ of academia. Finally, I will discuss lessons learned and recommendations for the aspirant administrators among the ranks of academic sociologists.     

Pension Participation: Do Parents Transmit Time Preference?

A wide range of economic and health behaviors are influenced by individuals’ attitudes toward the future—including investments in human capital, health capital and financial capital. Intergenerational correlations in such behaviors suggest an important role the family may play in transmitting time preferences to children. This article presents a model of parental investment in future-oriented capital, where parents shape their children’s time preference rates. The research identifies a dual role for a parent’s time preference rate in the process of shaping the offspring’s attitude toward the future, and discusses paths through which parents may socialize children to be patient. The model’s implications are studied by investigating the parent–child correlation in pension participation using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics     

Internalities and paternalism: applying the compensation criterion to multiple selves across time

One reason to call an activity a vice and suppress it is that it reduces a person’s future happiness more than it increases his present happiness. Gruber and Koszegi (Q J Econ 116(4):1261–1303, 2001) show how a vice tax can increase a person’s welfare in a model of multiple selves with hyperbolic preferences across time. The present paper shows that an interself analogy of the compensation criterion can justify a vice ban whether preferences are hyperbolic or exponential, but subject to the caveat that the person has a binding constraint on borrowing.     

Candidate Stability and Voting Correspondences

We extend the analysis of Dutta et al. (in Econometrica, 69:1013–1038, 2001) on strategic candidacy to multivalued environments. For each agenda and each profile of voters’ preferences over running candidates, a voting correspondence selects set of running candidates. A voting correspondence is candidate stable if no candidate ever has an incentive to withdraw her candidacy when all other potential candidates run for office. In the multivalued framework, candidates’ incentives to withdraw depend on candidates’ preferences over sets. If candidates cannot vote and they compare sets of candidates according to their expected utility conditional on some prior probability assessment, then a voting correspondence satisfies candidate stability and unanimity if and only if it is dictatorial. If the probability assessments are restricted to be uniform, candidates’ preferences over sets are consistent with leximin preferences, or candidates can vote, then possibility results are obtained.This paper is a revised version of the second chapter of my Ph.D. Dissertation submitted to the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I am indebted to my supervisor Salvador Barberà for his advice, encouragement, and patience. I thank the hospitality of the Wallis Institute of Political Economy at the University of Rochester, where the revision of this paper was conducted. I am grateful to two anonymous referees and the Associate Editor, John Weymark, for their exhaustive and insightful comments. I also thank Dolors Berga, Carmen Beviá, Walter Bossert, Jernej Čopič, Bhaskar Dutta, Matt Jackson, Jordi Massó, Diego Moreno, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Yves Sprumont for helpful conversations and suggestions. Financial support through Research Grant 1998FI00022 from Comissionat per Universitats i Recerca, Generalitat de Catalunya, Research Project PB98-870 from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, Fundación Barrié de la Maza, and Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Junta de Andalucía is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Experts,ideas, and policy change: the Russell Sage Foundation and small loan reform, 1909–1941

Between 1909 and 1941, the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) was actively involved in crafting and lobbying for policy solutions to the pervasive problem of predatory lending. Using a rich assortment of archival records, I build upon political learning theory by demonstrating how institutional conditions and political pressures – in addition to new knowledge gained through scientific study and practical experience – all contributed to the emergence and development of RSF experts’ policy ideas over the course of this 30-year period. In light of these findings, I suggest that policy ideas and political interests are mutually constitutive, and that the notion that ideas must be shown to operate independent of interests in order to “prove” that they matter in policymaking is misguided. Furthermore, I discuss the implications of the remarkable success of RSF’s policy proposals for current understandings of institutional change. In particular, I argue that the passage of RSF’s controversial Uniform Small Loan Law in 34 states suggests that political actors’ collective agency can produce significant policy reforms in a context of normal policymaking without the intervention of major destabilizing events.

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The Banks Set in Infinite Spaces

I provide a definition of the Banks set, or set of sophisticated voting outcomes, over an infinite policy space and when individual preferences are weak. I also show that the Banks set is a subset of one definition of the uncovered set, but not another. The interpretation of the Banks set in this setting differs from Banks’s original interpretation in the implicit role of the agenda setter. In addition, a characterization of the Banks set is provided for a three-player game of distributive politics. In this special setting, the Banks set and all definitions of the uncovered set have full measure over the space of alternatives.     

Sen’s theorem: geometric proof, new interpretations

Sen’s classic social choice result supposedly demonstrates a conflict between Pareto and minimal forms of liberalism. By providing the first direct mathematical proof of this seminal result, we underscore a significantly different interpretation: rather than conflicts among rights, Sen’s result occurs because the liberalism assumption negates the requirement that voters have transitive preferences. This explanation enriches interpretations of Sen’s conclusion by introducing radically new kinds of societal conflicts, by suggesting ways to sidestep these difficulties, and by providing insight into other approaches that have been used to avoid the difficulties. Our thanks to two referees for excellent suggestions. Saari’s research was supported by NSF grants DMI 0233798, 0640817, and DMS 0631362.     

Gender Bias in Parental Investments in Children’s Education: A Theoretical Analysis

Human capital accumulation is one of the main engines of economic growth. Thus, many LDCs have introduced laws over the past 30 years for compulsory education and have increased their investment in public schooling. Nevertheless, the level of education in most poor countries is still very low, particularly for girls. The goal of this article is to develop a model of household decision-making in order to better understand what variables affect parents’ decision to educate girls less than boys. In the first part of the paper, a unitary model, a non-cooperative household model, and a bargaining model are developed and compared to explain factors that might produce gender bias in investment in education. As a result, the number of years of education for male and female children depends on the different costs and returns of educating girls and boys and, in the non-consensus models, on each parent’s preferences and decision power. The second part of the paper contains a simulation of the models assuming different policies for increasing women’s education using figures from the Living Standard Measurement Studies of Cote d’Ivoire.     

“Public Policy is Like Having a Vaudeville Act”: Languages of Duty and Difference among Think Tank-Affiliated Policy Experts

This research note uses in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, and archival records to examine the self-understandings of think tank-affiliated policy experts. I argue that policy experts draw on a series of idioms—those of the academic scholar, the political aide, the entrepreneur, and the media specialist—to construct a unique albeit synthetic professional identity. The essence of the policy expert’s role lies in a continuous effort to balance and reconcile the contradictory imperatives associated with these idioms. An analysis of the policy expert’s mixed “professional psyche” offers a useful point of entry into the objective social structure of the think tank.     

How the market responds to dynamically inconsistent preferences

This paper responds to the ‘soft paternalist’ argument that the findings of behavioural economics make traditional objections to paternalism incoherent. We show that there is a normatively significant sense in which, even if individuals lack coherent preferences, competitive markets are efficient in providing them with opportunities to get what they want. Extending earlier analysis by Sugden, we model a multi-period ‘storage economy’ and explore the implications of dynamically inconsistent preferences. We show that, despite apparent conflicts of judgement between an individual’s ‘selves’, competitive markets provide maximal opportunity, and that they do so by facilitating voluntary exchanges between selves.     

Asymmetric Preference and Inflation Bias in the Visegrad Four

This paper investigates the asymmetric preference of monetary policy in the Visegrad four (V-4). To this end, we estimate the nonlinear interest rate rule provided by Surico (2007). This enables us to estimate the central banker’s preference and to inference the average inflation bias. Empirical results provide some important evidence. First, the nonlinear rule and the preference are successfully estimated. This also imply that the average rates of inflation in the V-4 are set at a relatively high by their monetary policy. Second, After EU accession, the preferences of Slovakia and Poland become much lower than those in the full sample. This reflects the policy effort by these two to introduce the euro.     

On the probability of observing Borda’s paradox

Previous studies have shown that, when voters’ preferences become more internally consistent or mutually coherent, the probability of observing Condorcet’s Paradox of cyclic majorities is reduced and tends to zero, in accordance with intuition. The current study shows that the impact of an increasing degree of mutual coherence among voters’ preferences on the likelihood of observing Borda’s Paradox is much more subtle and more difficult to analyze. The degree of the impact in this case depends both on the measure of mutual coherence that is considered and on the voting rule that is used. In some circumstances, the probability that Borda’s Paradox will occur actually increases when voters’ preferences become more internally consistent.     

“We am a virtual community”

Conclusion In summary, we are present at the birth of something special. Sociologists have an opportunity to observe the self-creation of electronic, virtual communities. While the development of conventional communities occurred over a time period so vast that we are denied records of their origins, the pace of evolution among today’s virtual communities is so fast as to make “keeping up” almost impossible. Fortunately, it is occurring in a medium that supports easy documentation—witness the ease with which I could report on netiquette by copying materials directly off the net. I find it difficult to terminate an article on the Internet since the phenomenon is still unfolding as I type this sentence. My own experience of the net is far different now than it was when I began this article just a few weeks ago. It will be radically different by the time you read this. Anyone who feels the future evolution of the Internet is fairly predictable should meditate on the fact that it’s chief supporters in government appear to be Al Gore and Newt Gingrich, an electronic odd couple. He is also the author ofThe Practice of Social Research and other textbooks.     

Generic difference of expected vote share and probability of victory maximization in simple plurality elections with probabilistic voters

In this paper I examine single member, simple plurality elections with n ≥ 3 probabilistic voters and show that the maximization of expected vote share and maximization of probability of victory are “generically different” in a specific sense. More specifically, I first describe finite shyness (Anderson and Zame in Adv Theor Econ 1:1–62, 2000), a notion of genericity for infinite dimensional spaces. Using this notion, I show that, for any policy in the interior of the policy space and any candidate j, the set of n-dimensional profiles of twice continuously differentiable probabilistic voting functions for which simultaneously satisfies the first and second order conditions for maximization of j’s probability of victory and j’s expected vote share at is finitely shy with respect to the set of n-dimensional profiles of twice continuously differentiable probabilistic voting functions for which satisfies the first and second order conditions for maximization of j’s expected vote share.     

Computational application of the mathematical theory of democracy to Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem (how dictatorial are Arrow’s dictators?)

The article is based on three findings. The first one is the interrelation between Arrow’s (Social choice and individual values, Wiley, New York, 1951) social choice model and the mathematical theory of democracy discussed by Tangian (Aggregation and representation of preferences, Springer, Berlin, 1991; Soc Choice Welf 11(1):1–82, 1994), with the conclusion that Arrow’s dictators are less harmful than commonly supposed. The second finding is Quesada’s (Public Choice 130:395–400, 2007) estimate of their power as that of two voters, implying that Arrow’s dictators are not more powerful than a chairperson with an additional vote. The third is the model of Athenian democracy (Tangian, Soc Choice Welf 31:537–572, 2008), where indicators of popularity and universality are applied to representatives and representative bodies. In this article, these indicators are used to computationally evaluate the representativeness/non-representativeness of Arrow’s dictators. In particular, it is shown that there always exist Arrow’s dictators who on the average share opinions of a majority, being rather representatives. The same holds for dictators selected by lot, which conforms to the practice of selecting magistrates and presidents by lot in ancient democracies and medieval Italian republics. Computational formulas are derived for finding the optimal “dictator–representatives”.