background: inadequate attention to management and institutional reforms is an important barrier to achieving universal health coverage. skilled and motivated public health managers in adequate numbers are an important requirement to overcome this hurdle. however, what are the career choices of medical students? are they interested in community medicine and public health? to document the career...

Measuring individual welfare using data on reported subjective well-being has made great progress. It offers a new way of confronting public choice hypotheses with field data, e.g. with respect to partisan preferences on unemployment and inflation or rents in the public bureaucracy. Insights from public choice also help to assess the role of happiness measures in public policy. We emphasize tha...

The fields of social choice theory and mechanism design deal with the aggregation of conflicting preferences in a group of agents, may they be electronic or human. Two central problems in these areas are the social choice problem and the mechanism design problem. We argue that the protection of individual preferences has not been considered so far and introduce the preference protection problem...

There is an apparent contradiction in the economic approach to government policy. On one hand, neoclassical economists are champions of ‘consumer sovereignty’. This is the idea that individuals are the best judges of what is in their interests and should be able to make their own decisions. For example, economists would tend to oppose a regulation that required airbags to be installed in new ca...