Opportunist politicians and the evolution ofelectoral competition

We study a unidimensional model of spatial competition between two parties with two types of politicians. The office oriented politicians, referred to as “opportunist” politicians, care only about the spoils of the office. The policy oriented politicians, referred to as “militant” politicians have ideological preferences on the policy space. In this framework, we compare a winner-take-all system, where all the spoils go to the winner, to a proportional system, where the spoils of office are split among the two parties proportionally to their share of the vote.We study the existence of short term political equilibria and then, within an evolutionary setup, the dynamics and stability of policies and of party membership decisions.Political competition. Opportunism. Downs.

Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility in Bargaining: Evidence from a Transcontinental Ultimatum Game

This paper presents the experimental results of a “Transcontinental Ultimatum Game” implemented between India and France. The bargaining took the form of standard ultimatum games, but in one treatment Indian subjects made offers to French subjects and, in another treatment, French subjects made offers to Indian subjects. We observed that French→Indian bargaining mostly ended up with unequal splits of money in favour of French, while nearly equal splits were the most frequent outcome in Indian→French interactions. The experimental results are organized through a standard social reference model, modified for taking into account the different marginal value of money for bargainers. In our model bargaining is driven by relative standings comparisons between players, occurring in terms of real earnings (that is monetary earnings corrected for a purchasing power factor) obtained in the game. The norm of equity behind the equalization of real earnings is called local equity norm, and contrasted to a global equity norm which would encompass the wealth of players beyond the game. According to what we observed, no beyond-game concern seems to be relevantly endorsed by subjects.Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility; Fairness; Bargaining experiment; Ultimatum Game

Richard McKelvey et la théorie politique

Ce texte passe en revue quelques contributions de Richard McKelvey à la théorie politique en général et à l'étude de la règle majoritaire en particulier.This text is a review of some contributions of Richard McKelvey to political theory in general and in particular to the study of majority rule

10101 Abstracts Collection -- Computational Foundations of Social Choice

From March 7 to March 12, 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10101 ``Computational Foundations of Social Choice \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

10101 Executive Summary -- Computational Foundations of Social Choice

This seminar addressed some of the key issues in computational social choice, a novel interdisciplinary field of study at the interface of social choice theory and computer science. Computational social choice is concerned with the application of computational techniques to the study of social choice mechanisms, such as voting rules and fair division protocols, as well as with the integration of social choice paradigms into computing. The seminar brought together many of the most active researchers in the field and focussed the research community currently forming around these important and exciting topics

Freedom In Economics : New Perspectives In Normative Analisyis

x; 298 hal.; ill.; 23c