European Populism: A Communicative Aspect

A Political Theory of Populism

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be in‡uenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’policies— i.e., policies to the left of the median voter— as a way of signaling that he is not from the right. Truly right-wing politicians r...

On the Communicative Aspect of Human-Robot Joint Action*

Actions performed in the context of a joint activity comprise two aspects: functional and communicative. The functional component achieves the goal of the action, whereas its communicative component, when present, expresses some information to the actor’s partners in the joint activity. The interpretation of such communication requires leveraging information that is public to all participants, ...

The communicative contexts of grammatical aspect use in English.

In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative ...

Rise of populism

Inefficient lobbying, populism and oligarchy

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of efficient truthful common-agency equilibria ha...