How local are local lists? A quantitative and qualitative analysis of local lists in Flanders

Local party systems in Western democracies are characterized by the presence of so-called independent local lists, giving a distinct place-bound flavour to local politics. Moreover, the presence of these local or non-national lists is generally assumed to counterbalance the entry of national parties into municipal elections and considered as an indication for the incompleteness of the party politicisation process. However, political reality suggests that not all local lists are as independent or as local as their label indicates and instead are related to national parties in varying degrees. This paper aims to contribute to a more detailed and refined understanding of these non-national lists. To do so, the first part of the paper develops an innovative and contingent classification model based on local lists’ vertical and horizontal autonomy. Consequently this classification model is applied to all non-national lists in Flanders over two electoral periods (2006 and 2012) allowing to establish the occurrence of the different types of local lists in Flanders. The second part of this paper aims to uncover the rationales of the different types of local lists. Based on a qualitative comparative case-analysis, the cost-benefit assessments relating to vote-seeking, office-seeking and policy-seeking goals of the different types of local lists are explored. This analysis enables to revealing the local causal mechanisms influencing the strategic choices of the different types of local lists and to interpret and clarify the established variation within the large group of local lists in Flanders

Information transmission in the absence of commitment

I consider an election with candidate entry and a state variable that affects all players' utility, as it translates their ideal points. Candidates are informed of the realization of the state, whilst voters are not. I study the effect of candidates' commitment on equilibria. I show that if they cannot commit, their private information is of no consequence for the election (i.e. even in a decisiontheoretic sense). Instead, when they can commit this is a standard signaling game

STRATEGIC RISK MANAGEMENT BEHAVIOR: WHAT CAN UTILITY FUNCTIONS TELL US?

The validity of the utility concept, particularly in an expected utility framework, has been questioned because of its inability to predict revealed behavior. In this paper we focus on the global shape of the utility function instead of the local shape of the utility function. We examine the extent of heterogeneity in the global shape of the utility function of decision makers and test whether its shape predicts strategic risk management behavior. We assess the utility functions and relate them to strategic decisions for portfolio managers (N = 104) and hog farmers (N = 239). The research design allows us to examine the robustness of our results and the extent to which the results can be generalized. Furthermore, we assess the shape of the utility functions for these decision makers applying two different methods. This allows us to further test the robustness of our empirical results. If there exists a relationship between the shape of the utility function and strategic decisions, both methods should yield the same result. The empirical results indicate that the global shape of the utility function differs across decision makers (fully concave or convex versus S-shaped), and that the global shape predicts strategic decisions (e.g., asset allocation strategy in the case of portfolio managers; type of production process employed in the case of hog farmers). These findings support the notion that the often criticized concept of utility is a useful concept when studying actual behavior, and highlight the importance of considering decision-maker behavior over a wide outcome range when examining strategic behavior.Risk and Uncertainty,

The Role of Equality and Efficiency in Social Preferences

Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) claim that a combination of efficiency seeking and minmax preferences dominates inequity aversion in simple dictator games. This result relies on a strong subject pool effect. The participants of their experiments were undergraduate students of economics and business administration who self-selected into their field of study and learned early on that efficiency is desirable. We show that for non-economists the preference for efficiency is much less pronounced. We also find a gender effect indicating that women are more egalitarian than men. However, perhaps surprisingly, the dominance of equality over efficiency is unrelated to political attitudes

Game Theory Via Revealed Preferences

We investigate equilibrium notions in game theory from the revealed preference approach. For extensive game forms with complete information, we derive a set of independent necessary and sufficient conditions for the observed outcomes to be rationalized by subgame perfect Nash equilibrium.

Neural signatures of strategic types in a two-person bargaining game

The management and manipulation of our own social image in the minds of others requires difficult and poorly understood computations. One computation useful in social image management is strategic deception: our ability and willingness to manipulate other people's beliefs about ourselves for gain. We used an interpersonal bargaining game to probe the capacity of players to manage their partner's beliefs about them. This probe parsed the group of subjects into three behavioral types according to their revealed level of strategic deception; these types were also distinguished by neural data measured during the game. The most deceptive subjects emitted behavioral signals that mimicked a more benign behavioral type, and their brains showed differential activation in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left Brodmann area 10 at the time of this deception. In addition, strategic types showed a significant correlation between activation in the right temporoparietal junction and expected payoff that was absent in the other groups. The neurobehavioral types identified by the game raise the possibility of identifying quantitative biomarkers for the capacity to manipulate and maintain a social image in another person's mind