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.     

The lexicographic egalitarian solution on economic environments

This paper considers solutions to distribution problems defined on economic environments. It shows that there is a unique resource-egalitarian and symmetric solution that proposes always Pareto optimal allocations and satisfies Inidivual Restricted Monotonicity; this property requires the poor people of the society to be strictly better-off when social resources increase and the initial outcome is a welfare unequal position. That unique solution is the lexicographic extension of the maxmin criterion.I wish to express my gratitude to Salvador Barberá. I am also very grateful to Hervé Moulin for his encouragement and to Carmen Herrero, Iñigo Iturbe and an anonymous referee for their suggestions. I thank very specially the valuable reading of John Roemer and illuminating conversations with Serge Christophe Kolm. Financial support from Gobierno de Navarra is gratefully acknowledged     

Identical preferences lower bound solution and consistency in economies with indivisible goods

We consider the problem of allocating a finite set of indivisible goods and a single infinitely divisible good among a group of agents, and we study a solution, called the Identical Preferences Lower Bound solution, in the presence of consistency properties. This solution is not consistent. We prove that its maximal consistent subsolution is the No-envy solution. Our main result is that the minimal consistent extension of the intersection of the Identical Preferences Lower Bound solution with the Pareto solution is the Pareto solution. This result remains true in the restricted domain when all the indivisible goods are identical, but not when there is a unique indivisible good.This paper was developed during my stay at Rochester University in the summer of 1992. I would like to express my special thanks to Professor William Thomson for all his help and advice. Iam also grateful to my supervisor Luis Corchón, to Koichi Tadenuma and to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The remaining errors are my exclusive responsibility. Financial support from the DGCYT under project PB 91-0756 and the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas are gratefully acknowledged.     

Monk business: An example of the dynamics of organizations

In this paper we present a dynamic model of an organization. It is shown that the quality of the members of the organization may change cyclically and that even if the organization promotes excellence, the organization may end up populated mostly by mediocre agents.I am grateful to Carmen Beviá, Clara Eugenia García, Iñigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, Piero Gottardi, an anonymous referee and the participants in a seminar in the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna for very helpful comments and to CICYT for financial support under grant BEC2002-02194.     

Condorcet choice functions and maximal elements

Choice functions on tournaments always select the maximal element (Condorcet winner), provided they exist, but this property does not hold in the more general case of weak tournaments. In this paper we analyze the relationship between the usual choice functions and the set of maximal elements in weak tournaments. We introduce choice functions selecting maximal elements, whenever they exist. Moreover, we compare these choice functions with those that already exist in the literature.Thanks are due to José Alcalde, J.V. Llinares and M.C. Sánchez, for helpful comments. The comments and suggestions of a referee’s report have improved the work; we are most grateful to her/him. Financial support from the Spanish DGICYT, under project BEC2001-0781, Fundación Séneca (PI74/00826/FS/01) and from the IVIE is acknowledged.     

Teachers’ collective bargaining outcomes and tradeoffs

This study uses data from Illinois and Iowa public school districts to examine the factors that influence the wage and nonwage bargaining outcomes negotiated by teachers’ unions. Tradeoffs between wage and nonwage outcomes and among nonwage contract provisions are also examined. The results provide some evidence that tradeoffs exist between wage and nonwage outcomes. The findings also reveal differences in outcome and tradeoff patterns across the states for issues unrelated to union security. I am grateful to the Illinois State Board of Education, the Iowa Department of Public Instruction, and the Iowa Public Employment Relations Board for providing the data analyzed in this study. I am also grateful to the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business for research support, and to Jack Fiorito, David Lewin, Susan Schwochau, Donna Sockell, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

International competition and the labor market prospects of union and nonunion workers

We investigate the relationship between international competition and the labor mar-ket prospects of a representative sample of British workers. Our analysis, which sets out the first explicit test of both the wage and employment implications of increased international competition, highlights an interesting asymmetry with competition neg-atively affecting the wage, but not the employment, prospects of unionized workers and the employment, but not the wage, prospects of nonunion workers. We have benefited from discussions with Monojit Chatterji, Michael Devereux, Lisa Grobar, Alan Man-ning, Chris Milner, and Ian Walker. Helpful comments were also received from seminar participants at the Universities of Aberdeen, City, Keele, and Loughborough. We are grateful to Daniel Kwok for excellent research assistance. The normal disclaimer applies.     

Membership participation and ideology in large voluntary organisations: The case of the National Trust

Commonly, voluntary organisations are formally accountable to their memberships, but the rights of members to influence organisational policies are often minimal. Members may be recruited by organisations to provide funding, legitimacy and voluntary help; members may join in order to obtain material benefits, to express support for organisations' goals and, in some cases, to influence policy. The disjunction between these two sets of expectations can lead to disputes in large voluntary bodies, especially those whose members hold a wide range of ideological positions. This creates problems for those running the organisations, who both have to account to a variety of other groups and also maintain their public legitimacy. Illustrations of some of these issues are drawn from environmental organisations, particularly the National Trust. An earlier version of this article was given at the first international conference of the International Society for Third Sector Research at Pecs, Hungary, in July 1994. I am very grateful to Michael Fogarty, Peter Jackson and Jean Warburton for detailed comments on earlier drafts.     

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.     

Redistribution of wealth when knowledge is dispersed

The second theorem of welfare economics is generalized so that ethical redistribution of wealth can be carried out by the centre by means of an adjustment rule that depends only on prices and an exogenously given feasible allocation x. When equilibrium is achieved each household i will have at least as much utility as it would derive from its component of x.Mike Peters and a referee of this journal provided useful expositional comments. I am grateful for their help and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) for financial support. Any defects in the paper can be attributed to the author.     

Social participation and charitable giving: A multivariate analysis

Despite an abundance of survey data on charitable giving, researchers have not analysed these data asking the kinds of theoretical questions and employing the kinds of multivariate statistical techniques that would advance our understanding of the social processes leading to charitable behaviour. This article reports the authors' first findings from their continuing efforts to develop and test such a multivariate causal model of the social, demographic, economic and motivational determinants of individual charitable giving. The first section outlines ouridentification theory of charitable giving. In the second section we discuss the data and how we operationalise our variables. The third section examines whether there is broad quantitative support for major tenets of the model developed if applied at the household level. In the fourth section we enquire about which factors are most strongly related to giving behaviour. We conclude with a discussion about the centrality of communities of participation for inducing charitable giving and about the practical implications for fundraising. An earlier version of this article was prepared for presentation at the annual conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, Berkeley, October 1994. The authors are grateful to the T. B. Murphy Charitable Trust, the Lilly Endowment and the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy for their support of this research. We are also grateful to Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Stephen M. Noga for providing data from theSurvey of Giving and Volunteering and for sharing their expertise. Finally, we wish to thank the Editor ofVoluntas and three anonymous reviewers for their careful and constructive suggestions.     

Freedom of choice and diversity of options: Some difficulties

This paper explores the possibility for a (non-preference-based) freedom ranking of opportunity sets that is sensitive to the diversity of the options. It turns out that how distances between sets and alternatives are measured is crucial to the derivation of such a ranking. Several proposals are examined, each of which is shown to lead to impossibility results. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at conferences in Kortrijk, Osnabrück, Oisterwijk, Caen and Pavia. I thank the participants at these conferences for their comments. I would also like to thank Steven Hartkamp, Theo Kuipers, Clemens Puppe and especially Kotaro Suzumura for their helpful comments. Furthermore, I am very grateful to Somdeb Lahiri for pointing out a mistake in a previous version of this paper.     

Social welfare rankings of income distributions A new parametric concept of intermediate inequality

This paper installs a new concept of intermediate inequality, which we refer to as η-inequality equivalence, in the notable form of equivalence of the Lorenz partial ordering and social welfare dominance. The η-inequality equivalence is a parameterized generalization of Krtscha’s (1994) non-linear compromise between the relative and absolute inequality views. For each η ∈ [0,1], we place a class of social evaluation functions satisfying the S-concavity as well as the property that an increase in incomes while leaving η-inequality intact raises welfare. We prove that one income distribution dominates another for all social evaluation functions in iff the former has a higher mean and a higher η-Lorenz curve. We prove also that the class is strictly increasing in the sense of inclusion as η decreases.I am grateful to Kiyoshi Kuga for his helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee and an associate editor for many valuable comments and suggestions that have much improved the paper. A previous version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Japanese Economic Association, October 7, 2001, Tokyo, Japan. I wish to thank Takashi Toyoda for his helpful comments and suggestions at the meeting. This research was supported in part by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan (Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research No.12630032).     

Reference functions and solutions to bargaining problems with and without claims

Following an idea due to Thomson (Journal of Economic Theory, 1981, 25: 431–441) we examine the role of reference functions in the axiomatic approach to the solution of bargaining problems with and without claims. A reference function is a means of summarizing essential features of a bargaining problem. Axioms like Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Monotonicity are then reformulated with respect to this reference function. Under some weak conditions on the reference function we obtain characterizations of different parametrized classes of solutions. We present several examples of reference functions and thereby recover many well-known solutions to bargaining problems with and without claims.This paper is part of the author’s Ph.D. thesis at Bielefeld University, Germany. The author is particularly grateful to Walter Trockel for his advice and to an associate editor and two referees for their helpful comments. Financial support through a scholarship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) at the graduate college ‘‘Mathematical Economics’’ is gratefully acknowledged.     

The involvement of canadian unions in political activities: An exploratory analysis

A conceptual framework is presented that depicts the political activities of public employee unions. The framework explicitly recognizes that access to elected officials affects unions’ ability to achieve political influence. Data covering 95 local unions in 26 major Canadian municipalities are used to test the framework. The results generally support the framework and suggest several observations about the effectiveness of union political activities. We are grateful to Susan Schwochau for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

A liberal paradox for judgment aggregation

In the emerging literature on judgment aggregation over logically connected propositions, expert rights or liberal rights have not been investigated yet. A group making collective judgments may assign individual members or subgroups with expert knowledge on, or particularly affected by, certain propositions the right to determine the collective judgment on those propositions. We identify a problem that generalizes Sen’s ‘liberal paradox’. Under plausible conditions, the assignment of rights to two or more individuals or subgroups is inconsistent with the unanimity principle, whereby unanimously accepted propositions are collectively accepted. The inconsistency can be avoided if individual judgments or rights satisfy special conditions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the LGS-4 Conference in Caen, June 2005, and at the World Congress of the Econometric Society in London, August 2005. We are grateful for the comments we received at both occasions as well as from anonymous referees. Franz Dietrich acknowledges financial support from the European Commission-DG Research Sixth Framework Programme (CIT-2-CT-2004-506084 / Polarization and Conflict Project). Christian List acknowledges the hospitality of the Social and Political Theory Program, RSSS, Australian National University.     

Social welfare and equality

The main purpose of the paper is to provide a unified framework within which normatively significant equality indices can be derived from social welfare orderings. The paper contains a functional representation of the class of social evaluation functions generating relative equality indices.A preliminary version of this paper was written while the second author was visiting the ISI. Financial support from the CAICYT project No. DI-87075, is greatefully acknowledged. We are grateful to W. Bossert and C. Blackorby for comments and useful discussion. The final version of the paper has greatly benefited from the suggestion of an anonymous referee.     

On the generic emptiness of the local core of voting games

The local core of voting games is investigated from a genericity point of view. There exist preference profiles for which it is empty and there exist preference profiles for which the local core and its complement are both dense in the set of alternatives. Furthermore the subset of profiles having an empty local core is dense in the whole set of profiles. Some remarks on the choice of the topology are provided.We are grateful to the French Commissariat Général du Plan for financial support and to Norman Schofield for having the opportunity to read McKelvey and Schofield (1986) before the publication. We are indebted to two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions and to Jerry Kelly for important comments and for correcting our English.     

Bargaining with set-valued disagreement

It is arguable that in many-two person bargaining situations disagreement leads to a set of possible payoffs with no probabilities attached to the elements of the set. Axioms are developed for bargaining games of this kind and solution concepts are derived from these axioms. Particular attention is paid to what are here called the max-max and rectangular general solutions. The latter can be applied to an important sub-class of bargaining games where the disagreement set is equal to the feasible set.A part of this work was done while I was a visitor at the University of Stockholm. For valuable discussions and comments I am grateful to T.C.A. Anant, Salvador Barbera, Bhaskar Dutta, Efe Ok, Jorgen Weibull and an anonymous referee of this journal. The paper also benefited from a presentation at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.