The transformation of society towards modernity and the attendant socio-economic challenges it has imposed on African societies have compelled insensitive traditional structures of governance to hijack traditional customs and practices to serve their ulterior motives. Thanksgiving to chiefs (kubika chiutsi, in Shona language), is one such traditional practice that has been manipulated to serve ...

This paper revisits the fiscal "decentralization theorem", by relaxing the role of the assumption that governments are benevolent, while retaining the assumption of policy uniformity. If instead, decisions are made by direct majority voting, (i) centralization can welfare-dominate decentralization even if there are no externalities and regions are heterogenous; (ii) decentralization can welfare...

People sometimes perceive a mind in inorganic entities like robots. Psychological research has shown that mind perception correlates with moral judgments and that immoral behaviors (i.e., intentional harm) facilitate mind perception toward otherwise mindless victims. We conducted a vignette experiment (N = 129; Mage = 21.8 ± 6.0 years) concerning human-robot interactions and extended previous r...

As I discussed in Chapter 1, the fact that good people often have to endure great tragedies while the wicked often prosper without being punished challenges the concept that the omnipotent and benevolent God closely supervises human affairs. However, an even more serious challenge comes from the historical evils unleashed in the twentieth century—the two world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam ...

Economists who believe that government is essentially benevolent tend to regard inter-governmental competition as a source of negative externalities that lower welfare. In contrast the public choice perspective, particularly that motivated by the Leviathan model, sees such competition as potentially beneficial. This paper considers a world consisting of politicians of both kinds – self-interest...

This research explored how gender portrayals in video games affect gender-related attitudes. Two hundred participants from the United Kingdom and Malaysia participated across three experiments, where appearance behaviour of game characters were manipulated with regard to target (enemy) (Study 1), sexually explicit attire 2) level character agency 3). We found minimal evidence that exposure gend...