We study whether and why voters may choose inefficient policies and institutions. We show that a majority of subjects in an experiment vote against policies that would help them overcome social dilemmas. This is due to their failure to fully anticipate the equilibrium effects of new policies. More precisely, subjects systematically underappreciate the extent to which policy changes affect other...

In this essay we address the puzzle that exists in American politics based on the tension of convergence to the electoral mean because of the MVT (mean voter theorem) and the studies showing divergence in candidate positioning.We provide amodel in which voters and states are not treated equally because of vast regional differences. In contrast with the MVT, candidates who campaign in each state...

A crucial aspect for the success of systems that provide decision or negotiation support is a good model of their user’s preferences. Psychology research has shown that people often do not have well-defined preferences. Instead they construct them during the elicitation process. This implies that the interaction between the system and a user can greatly influence the quality of the preference i...

We examined the psychometric properties of a German translation of the Child Global Report version of the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ). A total of 1219 German school-children (644 boys and 575 girls), ages 10–14 years participated in the study. The APQ was subjected to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Exploratory factor analysis produced five factors that were largely cons...

Single-peakedness is one of the most commonly used domain restrictions in social choice. However, the extent to which agent preferences are single-peaked in practice, and the extent to which recent proposals for approximate single-peakedness can further help explain voter preferences, is unclear. In this article, we assess the ability of both single-dimensional and multi-dimensional approximati...

Sexual isolation between species often depends on preferences for conspecific mates. Recent models suggest that whether conspecific preference is determined genetically or learned will affect the process of speciation: Learned conspecific preferences might make speciation more likely. However, we understand little about how often and for which taxa, conspecific preferences are learned. Some spe...

This paper examines how aversion to risk and aversion to intertemporal substitution determine the strength of the precautionary saving motive in a two-period model with Selden/Kreps-Porteus preferences. For small risks, we derive a measure of the strength of the precautionary saving motive which generalizes the concept of “prudence” introduced by Kimball [12]. For large risks, we show that decr...

Termination proving has traditionally been based on the search for (possibly lexicographic) ranking functions. In recent years, however, the discovery of termination proof techniques based on Ramsey’s theorem have led to new automation strategies, e.g. size-change, or iterative reductions from termination to safety. In this paper we revisit the decision to use Ramsey-based termination arguments...

In Possibilistic Decision Theory (PDT), decisions are ranked by a pessimistic and an optimistic qualitative criteria. The preference relations induced by these criteria have been axiomatized by corresponding sets of rationality postulates, both à la Neumann-Morgenstern and à la Savage. In this paper we first address a particular issue regarding the axiomatic systems of PDT à la von Neumann and ...

This paper describes a fully unsupervised and automated method for large-scale extraction of multiword expressions (MWEs) from large corpora. The method aims at capturing the non-compositionality of MWEs; the intuition is that a noun within a MWE cannot easily be replaced by a semantically similar noun. To implement this intuition, a noun clustering is automatically extracted (using distributio...