The 2002 Winter Olympics scandal: rent-seeking and committees

In the wake of a judging controversy at the Winter 2002 Olympic games, the governing council of the International Skating Union scrapped its judging system, replacing it with a new system which uses scores from only some of the judges, selected randomly. This means that the composition of the awarding committee is unknown. I examine rent-seeking expenditures when the composition of the committee is unknown relative to the case when it is known. When the composition of the committee is unknown, I find that rent-seeking expenditures directed towards each committee member may fall but aggregate rent-seeking expenditures will not fall. I find the counter-intuitive result that there may be no change in the rent-seeking effort directed at each committee member, even if it is known that some of the members will not be part of the final awarding committee. The results hinge on whether there is full rent dissipation or rent under-dissipation when the composition of the committee is known.     

A theory of voting patterns and performance in private and public committees

We compare play in private and public committees when insiders care both about how well the committee decision serves organizational goals, and about the rewards which outsiders give for representing their interests. We show that a private committee reaches decisions which better serve organizational goals than either a public committee or the median insider choosing alone; and that a committee can only exhibit a norm of consensus if insiders vote in private. Finally, any insider who does not vote for a private committee’s decision must vote for a decision which better serves organizational goals; whereas a dissident in a public committee votes for a decision which worse serves organizational goals.     

Cooperation between newcomers and incumbents: The role of normative disagreements

Cooperation in groups often requires individual members to make costly contributions that benefit the group as a whole. Prior research suggests that shared norms can help to support ingroup cooperation by prescribing common standards of how much to contribute. These common standards may be disrupted when groups undergo membership change, i.e., when members from outgroups enter the ingroup. When newcomers and incumbents have different notions about how much to contribute, a normative disagreement ensues that could undermine cooperation and the extent to which individuals identify with the group. In a laboratory experiment, we manipulate whether newcomers and incumbents disagree about how much to contribute in a public goods game with peer punishment. We examine whether normative disagreement between newcomers and incumbents affects newcomer-incumbent relations in terms of group identification, the emergence of a social norm, and costly punishment. The main goal is to test whether normative disagreement and the resulting newcomer-incumbent relations harm cooperation in terms of contributions to the common good. We find that normative disagreement between newcomers and incumbents negatively affects the emergence of a shared social norm and lowers feelings of group identification. Contrary to expectations, normative disagreement does not affect cooperation negatively. Instead, participants adjust their behavior to each other’s standards, using punishment for norm enforcement. This punishment is especially directed at low-contributing newcomers, leading them to conform to the incumbents’ higher contribution standards.     

Some startling inconsistencies when electing committees

We generalize the idea of a Condorcet winner to committee elections to select a Condorcet committee of size m. As in the case of a Condorcet winner, the Condorcet committee need not exist. We adapt two methods to measure how far a set of m candidates is from being the Condorcet committee. In particular, we generalize a procedure proposed by Lewis Carroll for selecting the candidate that is closest to being the Condorcet winner to allow the selection of a committee. We also generalize Kemenys method, which gives a complete transitive ranking, to the selection of committees and show that it is closely related to the first method.We show that these methods lead to some surprising inconsistencies. For example, the committee of size k may be disjoint from the committee of size j or they may overlap in any manner, the committee arising from Carrolls method may appear at any locations in the Kemeny ranking, and except for two highly restrictive cases, the members of the committee arising from Kemenys method may appear at any location in the Kemeny ranking. The author wishes to express his thanks to Don Saari for his conversations and suggestions for the paper and to the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California at Irvine where the initial work for this paper took place. He also wishes to thank the anonymous reviewer whose careful reading and suggestions greatly improved the paper.     

Normlessness,Anomie, and the Emotions

In Suicide, Durkheim described two qualitatively different experiences of normative anomie, each with a distinct affective basis: an intentional, if not ruthless, disdain for society's normative order; and an unintentional disregard for, or confusion about, norms or rules of conduct. We generalize Durkheim's classification of the socioaffective aspects of anomic suicide, and present two theoretical models of normlessness‐anomie and the emotions. These models posit that intentional anomie involves the primary emotions anger, disgust, and joy‐happiness; these emotions can combine to form the secondary emotions contempt, pride, and derisiveness. Unintentional, passive anomie rather involves the emotions surprise, fear, and sadness; these can combine to form the secondary emotions disappointment, shame, and alarm. We additionally hypothesize that each kind of anomie has distinct potential behavioral consequences: intentional anomie can result in immorality, shamelessness, acquisitiveness, and premeditated homicidality; unintentional anomie, in depression, confusion, uncertainty, unpremeditated homicidality, and suicidality.     

BUDGET COMMITTEE AND INTERGOVERNMENTAL TRANSFER: EVIDENCE FROM SOUTH KOREA

This paper revisits the claim that members of legislative committees direct more earmark spending to their constituents. In South Korea's legislature, a national law regulating the budget committee provides an unusual source of exogenous variation in membership: members of the committee are rotated each year owing to 1-year term limits. Using data from 226 local governments, and both within-district and within-member variations in membership, we find that districts represented by a budget committee member secure roughly 3% more subsidies than those represented by a nonmember. (JEL D72, D78, H70)     

It's Not What You Do,But Who You Are: Informal Social Control,Social Status,and Normative Seriousness in Organizations

This paper analyzes the impact of managerial social status on the normative evaluation of managerial acts in organizational contexts. We test several propositions on the relationship between social status and normative evaluation derived from Donald Black's theoretical framework on social control. The research design consists of a factorial survey of 200 managers. Each respondent evaluated the seriousness of a normatively questionable managerial act. In each vignette, the perpetrator's social status was systematically manipulated in either a high or a low condition. The results generally support the argument that the higher a manager's social status the less vulnerable that individual is to unfavorable normative evaluations, holding constant the act. The paper closes with discussion of our findings in light of social structural and rational choice perspectives on informal social control in organizations. Additionally, we discuss methodological issues related to experimental research on informal social control in organizations, the consistency of our findings with those from previous studies of social control across diverse settings, potential theoretical applications and extensions of Black's framework in organizational contexts, and practical implications for the implementation of corporate codes of conduct and corporate dispute resolution systems.     

Inefficient committees: small elections with three alternatives

We consider small committees which have to elect one of three alternatives using the simple plurality rule. Committee members have common, state-dependent preferences and receive imprecise private signals about the state of nature prior to the election. We are interested in whether the committee decision is efficient, that is whether the probability with which the committee elects the correct alternative is higher than the probability with which one single individual alone—on behalf of the others—would. It has been shown that there exists a unique efficient equilibrium in elections with two alternatives. We show that this result does not extend to elections with more alternatives. Multiple equilibria may exist for the same committee, and there may be both efficient and inefficient ones. Informative voting may or may not be an equilibrium. Also contrary to two-alternative elections, there exist responsive equilibria in which voters vote ‘against’ their signal. As a consequence, only two alternatives receive positive expected vote shares and the outcome is inefficient.     

Dividing Justly in Bargaining Problems with Claims

Theoretical research on claims problems has concentrated on normative properties and axiomatizations of solution concepts. We complement these analyses by empirical evidence on the predictability of three classical solution concepts in a bankruptcy problem. We examine both people’s impartial normative evaluations as well as their actual negotiation behavior in a bargaining with claims environment. We measure people’s judgments on the normative attractiveness of solution concepts with the help of a survey and also observe actual agreements in a bargaining experiment with real money at stake. We find that the proportional solution is the normatively most attractive rule, whereas actual negotiation agreements are closest to the ‘constrained equal-award’ solution.     

Committees with Farsighted Voters: A New Interpretation of Stable Sets

The interpretation of von Neumann–Morgenstern stable sets in voting games has been debated by most political scientists. The present paper addresses the issue in a model that consists of an infinite sequence of repetitions of the standard committee game. The analysis of equilibrium processes leads to the following conclusion: when voters are farsighted, an alternative is the limit of an absorbing equilibrium process if and only if it belongs to some stable set of the underlying committee game. While the traditional interpretation of the core implicitly assumes myopic voters, we also demonstrate that the core of a strong committee is the unique limit of all absorbing equilibrium processes, provided that voters are arbitrarily patient. We finally proceed to an analysis of the Condorcet Paradox in this dynamic context.     

DELIBERATION AND LEARNING IN MONETARY POLICY COMMITTEES

We use records from Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings to investigate the importance of deliberation and learning in monetary policy decision making in the period from 1970 to 1978 when Arthur Burns served as Chairman. We first propose a model of Bayesian learning in which FOMC members learn from each other as they sequentially reveal their policy preferences in a committee meeting. Then, as an alternative, we investigate a model in which members defer to an emerging consensus. Neither model is supported by the data, suggesting that within‐meeting deliberation might have had little effect on the quality of monetary policy decisions in the Burns era. (JEL E520, E580)     

AGENDA CONTROL AND RECIPROCITY IN SEQUENTIAL VOTING DECISIONS

We study how reciprocity affects the extent to which a chair can exploit her control over an agenda if a committee votes sequentially on a known series of binary proposals. We show in a parsimonious laboratory experiment that committee members form vote trading coalitions favoring early proposals not only when the sequence of proposals is exogenously given, but also when a chair controls the sequence of proposals. Vote trading occurs even though chairs manipulate the agenda in their favor. Punishment for chairs exploiting agenda control is weak as chairs reciprocate support by others more frequently than nonchairs. (JEL C92, D71, D72)     

A critical note on the role of the capability approach for sustainability economics

Can sustainability economics profit from the fusion with Amartya Sen's capability approach, thereby gaining solid normative foundations and wider applicability? We argue that this fusion is mistaken to the extent that the capability approach is essentially a static normative framework while sustainability economics demands a systematic long-term view with focus on wide-ranging societal change. These demands are best realized by taking an evolutionary perspective that focuses on the evolution and development of societies.     

Norms,status and the dynamics of advice networks: A case study

The issue of the influence of norms on behavior is as old as sociology itself. This paper explores the effect of normative homophily (i.e. “sharing the same normative choices”) on the evolution of the advice network among lay judges in a courthouse. 0020 and 0025 social exchange theory suggests that members select advisors based on the status of the advisor. Additional research shows that members of an organization use similarities with others in ascribed, achieved or inherited characteristics, as well as other kinds of ties, to mitigate the potentially negative effects of this strong status rule. We elaborate and test these theories using data on advisor choice in the Commercial Court of Paris. We use a jurisprudential case about unfair competition (material and “moral” damages), a case that we submitted to all the judges of this court, to test the effect of normative homophily on the selection of advisors, controlling for status effects. Normative homophily is measured by the extent to which two judges are equally “punitive” in awarding damages to plaintiffs. Statistical analyses combine longitudinal advice network data collected among the judges with their normative dispositions. Contrary to what could be expected from conventional sociological theories, we find no pure effect of normative homophily on the choice of advisors. In this case, therefore, sharing the same norms and values does not have, by itself, a mitigating effect and does not contribute to the evolution of the network. We argue that status effects, conformity and alignments on positions of opinion leaders in controversies still provide the best insights into the relationship between norms, structure and behavior.     

Size and distributional uncertainty, public information and the information paradox

In this paper we examine the strategic implications of collective acquisition of information in a committee or in a legislature. We show that the prospect of acquiring information can harm a majority even if information is only available by the support of a majority. Moreover, the model provides two results about incentives to acquire information. First, for policies with high distributional uncertainties, we expect that less information is acquired collectively by a committee than for other policies. Second, for policies that show only size uncertainty, our model predicts intense efforts to acquire information collectively. Received: 20 January 1997/Accepted: 15 February 1999     

广州基层社区组织建设研究

社区组织的建构,关键是要打破高度行政化的“街居制”组织格局,培育现代网络型“社区制”组织体系。其中,从可行性策略看,把居委会当作社区建设切入点与重头戏,进行传统居委会改造,以实现居委会向自组织的彻底转型。同时,政府在与社区组织的关系上,建立新型委托代理关系,并营造出既有政府授权、又能提供各种管理服务的,包括居委会、业主委员会、物业公司、多元非赢利民间团体、各机关企事业单位共同形成的社区组织体系。     

Spatial Variation in U.S. Labor Markets and Workplace Gender Segregation: 1980–2005*

Many studies of workplace inequality have examined why workplace gender segregation still exists and how gender segregation affects workplaces (Cohen, Huffman, and Knauer 2009 Work and Occupations 36(4):318; Huffman, Cohen, and Pearlman 2010 Administrative Science Quarterly 55(2):255). Yet, fewer studies have examined how space might affect gender segregation. In this paper, we investigate two types of space, normative space and industrial space, and their influence on gender workplace segregation within geographic space. We use data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and mixed models to examine how normative and industrial spaces affect workplaces within geographic space. We find that both measures of normative and industrial space predict differing levels of gender segregation within geographic spaces (measured via commuting zones). In addition, the effects normative space (women's share of the labor force) has on gender segregation are mediated by industrial restructuring.     

Collegial oligarchy and networks of normative alignments in transnational institution building

This paper presents a combined relational and cultural approach to transnational institution building by focusing on a network analysis of a small collegial oligarchy and normative alignments among its peers. To contribute to a theory of institutionalization, we propose hypotheses about whom professionals as institutional entrepreneurs are likely to select as members of their collegial oligarchy, about the role of social networks among them in identifying these leaders, and about the costs of alignments on these leaders’ normative choices. We test these hypotheses using mainly Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) applied to a dataset including network information and normative choices collected at the so-called Venice Forum – a field-configuring event that was central in creating and mobilizing a network of European patent judges for the construction of a new transnational institution, the European Unified Patent Court. We track normative alignments on the collegial hierarchy in this network of judges and their divergent interpretations of the contemporary European patent. Highlighting this under-examined articulation of relational infrastructures and cultural framing in transnational institutionalization shows how Northern European forms of capitalism tend to dominate in this institutionalization process at the expense of the Southern European forms. It also helps reflect on the usefulness of analyses of small networks of powerful players in organizational societies, where power and influence are highly concentrated.     

Human Rights and Economics: The Conceptual Basis for their Complementarity

Human rights theorists and economists have tended to talk past, rather than to, each other, especially in the field of development. On one level this is to be expected. Human rights theory adopts a normative, deontological approach, while economists see their discipline as a positive science and are comfortable with its consequentialism. But a closer look at the relationship suggests more complementarities. Human rights theory can help provide a normative framework that avoids some of the pitfalls of welfare theory, and can help economists deal with issues of exploitation and power relations. These complementarities have increased in importance as the development discourse incorporates legal and political issues previously considered beyond the scope of economists and development practitioners.