PARTY FORMATION INCOLLECTIVE DECISION-MAKING

We study party formation in a general model of collective decisionmaking, modeling parties as agglomerations of policy positions championed by decision-makers. We show that if there are economies of party size and the policy chosen is not beaten by another policy in pairwise voting, then players agglomerate into exactly two parties. This result does not depend on the magnitude of the economies of party size or sensitively on the nature of the individuals' preferences. Our analysis encompasses a wide range of models, including decision-making in committees with costly participation and representative democracy in which the legislature is elected by citizens.

Party formation in single-issue politics [revised]

We study the implications of economies of party size in a model of party formation. We show that when the policy space is one-dimensional, candidates form at most two parties. This result does not depend on the magnitude of the economies of party size or sensitively on the nature of the individuals' preferences. It does depend on our assumptions that the policy space is one-dimensional and that uncertainty is absent; we study how modifications of these assumptions affect our conclusions.Political parties, party formation, economies of party size

Cost benefit analysis vs. referenda

We consider a planner who chooses between two possible public policies and ask whether a referendum or a cost benefit analysis leads to higher welfare. We find that a referendum leads to higher welfare than a cost benefit analyses in "common value" environments. Cost benefit analysis is better in "private value" environments.Cost benefit analysis, elections, referenda, project evaluation

Equilibria for a Three-Person Location Problem

We find all the mixed strategy equilibria, within a certain class, of the simplified three-firm location model of Hotelling (in which the price variable is ignored)

Profit-Sharing in a Collusive Industry

We study a model in which collusive duopolists divide up the monopoly profit according to their relative bargaining power. We are particularly interested in how the negotiated profit shares depend on the sizes of the firms. If each can produce at the same constant unit cost up to its capacity, we show that the profit per unit of capacity of the small firm is higher than that of the large one. We also study how the ratio of the negotiated profits depends on the size of demand relative to industry capacity, and how this ratio changes with variations in demand

Noncooperative Models of Bargaining

Chapter 07 in Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications, 1992, vol. 1, pp 179-225 from ElsevierCenter for Research on Economic and Social Theory, Department of Economics, University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100631/1/ECON108.pd

Positively responsive collection choice rules and majority rule: a generalization of May's theorem to many alternatives

A collective choice rule selects a set of alternatives for each collective choice problem. Suppose that the alternative ’x’, is in the set selected by a collective choice rule for some collective choice problem. Now suppose that ‘x’ rises above another selected alternative ‘y’ in some individual’s preferences. If the collective choice rule is “positively responsive”, ‘x’ remains selected but ‘y’ is no longer selected. If the set of alternatives contains two members, an anonymous and neutral collective choice rule is positively responsive if and only if it is majority rule (May 1952). If the set of alternatives contains three or more members, a large set of collective choice rules satisfy these three conditions. We show, however, that in this case only the rule that assigns to every problem its strict Condorcet winner satisfies the three conditions plus Nash’s version of “independence of irrelevant alternatives” for the domain of problems that have strict Condorcet winners. Further, no rule satisfies the four conditions for the domain of all preference relations

Use of explicit priming to phenotype absolute pitch ability

Musicians with absolute pitch (AP) can name the pitch of a musical note in isolation. Expression of this unusual ability is thought to be influenced by heritability, early music training and current practice. However, our understanding of factors shaping its expression is hampered by testing and scoring methods that treat AP as dichotomous. These fail to capture the observed variability in pitch-naming accuracy among reported AP possessors. The aim of this study was to trial a novel explicit priming paradigm to explore phenotypic variability of AP. Thirty-five musically experienced individuals (Mage = 29 years, range 18–68; 14 males) with varying AP ability completed a standard AP task and the explicit priming AP task. Results showed: 1) phenotypic variability of AP ability, including high-accuracy AP, heterogeneous intermediate performers, and chance-level performers; 2) intermediate performance profiles that were either reliant on or independent of relative pitch strategies, as identified by the priming task; and 3) the emergence of a bimodal distribution of AP performance when adopting scoring criteria that assign credit to semitone errors. These findings show the importance of methods in studying behavioural traits, and are a key step towards identifying AP phenotypes. Replication of our results in larger samples will further establish the usefulness of this priming paradigm in AP research