Voting for the Electoral System: an Experiment.

The choice of the electoral system should be delegated to the citizens. However, citizens are not sufficiently informed to choose the system directly. It is argued that they may instead state their preferences for two basic characteristics of a Parliament, i.e. Governability and Representativeness. It is then possible to choose the system through a purely technical procedure. An experiment illustrates the method.

On the Xenophobia of non-discriminated Ethnic Minorities

Sometimes the leaders of ethnic minority groups behave in a way that may promote xenophobia. A simple two-subject model is used to find out when this behaviour is rational. The conditions are briefly discussed with reference to the Italian case. An appendix illustrates the definition of xenophobia adopted in the paper.

Choosing the electoral system: why not simply the best one?

The paper illustrates a simple empirical rule to choose the best electoral system for a Parliament.

The program for the simulation of electoral systems ALEX4.1: what it does and how to use it.

This paper illustrates ALEX4.1, the 2007 version of the program of simulation of electoral systems developed at ALEX, the Laboratory for Experimental and Simulative Economics of the Università del Piemonte Orientale at Alessandria, Italy. The main features of the program have been described with reference to a previous version in Bissey, Carini and Ortona, 2004; the paper may be freely downloaded from the site of the journal where it has been published, or in its working paper version from the site http://polis.unipmn.it/. The organization of this paper is, consequently, rather unusual. The next section presents only the very basic traits of the simulation program, as most details and theoretical considerations may be read in the quoted (and easy-to-find) reference. Sections 3 and 4 are the most important: they illustrate the novelties of ALEX4.1 with respect to previous versions. Section 5 is very short, as it contains only the instructions for downloading the program, and some caveats regarding its use. The core of the paper is a large appendix that contains the readme file of the package ALEX4.1. Actually, this paper should be considered a handbook for the use of ALEX4.1.

A commonsense assessment of Arrow's theorem

Abstract The usual, pessimistic interpretation of Arrow's General Possibility Theorem (often "Impossibility" in textbooks) is excessive. The impossibility defined by Arrow occurs only in presence of a tie or of a cycle. These cases are rare or very rare, and their presence may be assessed ex post. If they occur it is necessary to resort to a second-best rule, but this two-stage procedure does not induce strategic behavior, nor impeaches the use of the Condorcet rule (in observance of the axioms) in all the others. The paper conclusions sustain that implementation of modern management systems to government's public institutions should deal with a different behavior used to know at companies. In this respect, the paper high-lights different aspects between companies and public institutions behavior admitting similarities on organizational structure and internal procedures

Una politica di emergenza contro la disoccupazione semplice, efficace e quasi efficiente (A policy against unemployment simple, effective and nearly efficient)

It is suggested that it is possible to enhance employment through a large reduction of the cost of newly hired workers, with no changes in net wage. If the unemployment is high, this policy is almost surely efficient, but for minor caveats. 400 italian entrepreneurs where asked to assess the policy. It resulted that its effect may be considerable, and close to the one that may be obtained through the full flexibilization of the labour market becomes fully flexible.

An experimental inquiry into the nature of relational goods

Our experiment aims at studying the impact of two types of relational goods on the voluntary contributions to the production of a public good, i.e. acquaintance among the contributors and having performed a common work before the experiment. We implement two treatments with 128 participants from two different groups. In the first treatment the subjects are left talking in a room before the experiment (cheap talk treatment); they are not suggested any particular topic to talk about, nor are they requested to perform any activity in particular. The second treatment involves the performance of a common work (namely, the computation of some indices of economic performance of three companies, based on their balance sheets). The two groups of subjects are composed either by people with or without previous acquaintance. An equal number of subjects from each of these groups is then allocated to either treatment. After that the subjects played a standard 10-rounds public goods game in groups of 4. The groups were gender-homogeneous. This allows us also to inquire for the possible presence of a gender effect in our experiment. Our results show that: 1) both common work and previous acquaintance increase the average contribution to the public good, 2) there is a relevant gender effect with women contributing more or less than men, depending on the treatment. Therefore, we conclude that relational goods are important to enhance cooperation, that acquaintance and working together are rather complements than substitutes, and that different relational goods produce different effects on cooperation. Also, we find further evidence for women's behaviour to be more context-specific than men's.relational goods; public goods experiments; gender effect

A weighted-voting electoral system that performs quite well.

The paper describes a weighted-voting system for the election of a Parliament. The system is easy to implement, and it dominates plurality, where "dominates" means that it performs better with reference to both representativeness and stability. The system has some other nice properties,namely (a) it offers an easy-to-read evaluation of the loss of representativeness of an electoral system; and (b) it makes it relatively easy to adopt the best system after the vote, i.e. the best system conditional to the choice of electors. Indicators for representativeness and stability are defined. Results are experimental.

Labour supply in presence of taxation financing public services. An experimental approach.

The paper illustrates the results of some experiments aiming to test the effect of taxation on the effort. Differently from previous experiments (Levy-Garboua et al., Sutter and Weck-Hannemann, Swenson), in our research the revenue of taxation is not depleted but employed, more realistically, to finance welfare provisions. The result is no more a reduction of effort, as in previous experiments, but a slight increase. This behavior is coherent with a theoretical model suggested by Bird in 2001.