Socially Optimal Districting: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration

Socially Optimal Districting: a Theoretical and Empirical Exploration

This paper investigates the problem of optimal districting in the context of a simple model of legislative elections. In the model, districting matters because it determines the seat-vote curve, which describes the relationship between seats and votes. The paper rst characterizes the optimal seat-vote curve, and shows that, under a weak condition, there exist districtings that generate this ide...

The personality of young artists: an empirical and theoretical exploration.

Despite venerable stereotypes and even some recent empirical observations regarding the personality of artists, the following questions remain unanswered in any objective way: (1) Do personality factors differentiate art students from other students of the same age and sex? (2) Is there a relationship between the personality of art students and the values they hold? (3) Are there differences in...

Socially Optimal

This paper provides a welfare economic analysis of the problem of districting. In the context of a simple micro-founded model intended to capture the salient features of U.S. politics, it studies how a social planner should allocate citizens of different ideologies across districts to maximize aggregate utility. In the model, districting determines the equilibrium seat-vote curve which is the r...

Making SENSE: socially enhanced search and exploration

Online communities like Flickr, del.icio.us and YouTube have established themselves as very popular and powerful services for publishing and searching contents, but also for identifying other users who share similar interests. In these communities, data are usually annotated with carefully selected and often semantically meaningful tags, collaboratively chosen by the user who uploaded an item a...

The activities of a school-based teacher educator: A theoretical and empirical exploration