Assessing success and decisiveness in voting situations

In this paper we propose a simple model for measuring success or decisiveness in voting situations. For an assessment of these features two inputs are claimed to be necessary: the voting rule and the voters behavior. The voting rule specifies when a proposal is to be accepted or rejected depending on the resulting vote configuration. Voting behavior is summarized by a distribution of probability over the vote configurations. This basic model provides a clear common conceptual basis for reinterpreting different power indices and some related game theoretic notions coherently from a unified point of view.The authors would like to thank to M. Braham, M. Machover, N. Megiddo and F. Steffen, for their comments, and to J. F. Mertens for pointing out a misstatement, in all cases referring to previous versions of this paper. This research has been supported by the DGES of the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura under project PB96-0247, by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under project BEC2000-0875, and by the Universidad del País Vasco under project UPV/EHU00031.321-HA-7918/2000. The first author also acknowledges the financial support from a postdoctoral grant from the Basque Government (2000–2001) and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under the Ramón y Cajal Program.     

MULTIPLE EQUILIBRIA AND DETERRENCE IN AIRLINE MARKETS

We use a longitudinal dataset from the U.S. airline industry to estimate three different models for entry games with very general forms of heterogeneity between U.S. carriers in airline markets: a simultaneous game with complete information and two sequential games with or without strategic entry deterrence. In a sequential game with entry deterrence, an incumbent decides whether to incur a cost to deter potential entrants. We show that the model with sequential games with strategic deterrence provides the best fit to the data. We conclude that the results reject the hypothesis of a static model and support the hypothesis of the existence of strategic entry deterrence. (JEL L1)     

Livability of Urban Public Spaces in Northern Swedish Cities: The Case of Umeå

This study explores how winter conditions are taken into accountin urban planning in the city of Umeå in northern Sweden. Snowand harsh winter conditions are to some extent considered in urban planning in most northern towns in Sweden. Besides that, snow and ice could also be elements in the city attracting people and contribute to the design of public spaces. Current plans and interviews with planners were complemented with participatory observations. The results show that public spaces designed for both winter and summer seasons are preferred.     

Strongly chordal and chordal bipartite graphs are sandwich monotone

A graph class is sandwich monotone if, for every pair of its graphs G ₁=(V,E ₁) and G ₂=(V,E ₂) with E ₁⊂E ₂, there is an ordering e ₁,…,e _k of the edges in E ₂∖E ₁ such that G=(V,E ₁∪{e ₁,…,e _i }) belongs to the class for every i between 1 and k. In this paper we show that strongly chordal graphs and chordal bipartite graphs are sandwich monotone, answering an open question by Bakonyi and Bono (Czechoslov. Math. J. 46:577–583, 1997). So far, very few classes have been proved to be sandwich monotone, and the most famous of these are chordal graphs. Sandwich monotonicity of a graph class implies that minimal completions of arbitrary graphs into that class can be recognized and computed in polynomial time. For minimal completions into strongly chordal or chordal bipartite graphs no polynomial-time algorithm has been known. With our results such algorithms follow for both classes. In addition, from our results it follows that all strongly chordal graphs and all chordal bipartite graphs with edge constraints can be listed efficiently.     

Aversion to inequality in Italy and its determinants

The main goal of this paper is to estimate the preferences of the Italian society towards equity in order to verify whether preferences (i) have changed across the years, and (ii) can be related to specific socio-demographic characteristics. Introducing equity concerns in the implementation of economic policies is a fundamental problem faced by both economists and policy makers. This paper uses a social welfare function à la Jorgenson and Slesnick to estimate society’s aversion towards inequality by implementing a voting scheme for compiling individuals’ equity preferences into a social choice by majority rule. The results show that preferences are highly polarized toward a low and a high concern for equity aversion and that this concern is significantly related with several sociodemographic characteristics. Among them, income plays an important role with richer people tending to favor less equity. Results also show that preferences towards equity have changed across the years.     

The Recent Crisis Impact on the Economies of Some Countries of Central and Eastern Europe

Wealth of nations is nowadays something complex depending on democratic processes and debt accumulation. In Europe the EURO introduction provoked even more complexity, as there is no common government to steer the fiscal process, a situation without precedence. New solutions are therefore looked for, based on different schools of thought in order to tackle the problem. The analytical part analyzes the economic behaviour of four recently less studied countries. A comparison between them is based on time series of Real GDP Growth, Consumer Price Inflation, Government Balance.     

POLITICIANS AT WORK: THE PRIVATE RETURNS AND SOCIAL COSTS OF POLITICAL CONNECTIONS

We quantify the private returns and social costs of political connections exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset that combines matched employer–employee data for a representative sample of Italian firms with administrative archives on the universe of individuals appointed in local governments over the period 1985–1997. According to our results, the revenue premium granted by political connections amounts to 5.7% on average, it is obtained through changes in domestic sales but not in exports, and it is not related to improvements in firm productivity. The connection premium is positive for upstream producers for the public administration only, and larger (up to 22%) in areas characterized by high public expenditure and high levels of corruption. These findings suggest that the gains in market power derive from public demand shifts towards politically connected firms. We estimate that such shifts reduce the provision of public goods by approximately 20%.     

Multidimensional item response theory models for dichotomous data in customer satisfaction evaluation

In this paper, multidimensional item response theory models for dichotomous data, developed in the fields of psychometrics and ability assessment, are discussed in connection with the problem of evaluating customer satisfaction. These models allow us to take into account latent constructs at various degrees of complexity and provide interesting new perspectives for services quality assessment. Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques are considered for estimation. An application to a real data set is also presented.     

Interpretation of the coefficient of determination of an ANOVA model as a measure of polarization

In this paper, it is demonstrated that coefficient of determination of an ANOVA linear model provides a measure of polarization. Taking as the starting point the link between polarization and dispersion, we reformulate the measure of polarization of Zhang and Kanbur using the decomposition of the variance instead of the decomposition of the Theil index. We show that the proposed measure is equivalent to the coefficient of determination of an ANOVA linear model that explains, for example, the income of the households as a function of any population characteristic such as education, gender, occupation, etc. This result provides an alternative way to analyse polarization by sub-populations characteristics and at the same time allows us to compare sub-populations via the estimated coefficients of the ANOVA model.     

Aversion to inequality in Italy and its determinants

The main goal of this paper is to estimate the preferences of the Italian society towards equity in order to verify whether preferences (i) have changed across the years, and (ii) can be related to specific socio-demographic characteristics. Introducing equity concerns in the implementation of economic policies is a fundamental problem faced by both economists and policy makers. This paper uses a social welfare function à la Jorgenson and Slesnick to estimate societys aversion towards inequality by implement in a voting scheme for compiling individuals equity preferences in to a social choice by majority rule. The results show that preferences are highly polarized toward a low and a high concern for equity aversion and that this concern is significantly related with several sociodemographic characteristics. Among them, income plays an important role with richer people tending to favor less equity. Results also show that preferences towards equity have changed across the years.