The “collective approach” to household behaviour relaxes the restrictive features of the unitary model by specifying household welfare to be a weighted combination of the individuals’ utilities. However, the weights are assumed fixed or exogenous to the analysis. This paper extends the collective approach by proposing and estimating a framework where the weights are determined and simultaneousl...

A pillage game is a formal model of Hobbesian anarchy as a coalitional game. The technology of pillage is specified by a power function that determines the power of each coalition as a function of its members and their wealth. A coalition can despoil any other coalition less powerful than itself. The present paper studies the problem of achieving an efficient allocation of resources when the re...

eXecutive summary The digital age has put the consumer in the driver’s seat, and businesses are working hard to understand how this new dynamic could impact brand engagement. Empowered by “alwayson” Internet connections and informed by the opinions of others, many consumers believe they are better informed than sales associates and would rather not engage them. As the balance of power shifts fr...

Department of Geography " Turkey is a concrete link between two continents. The country is also at the centre of the intersection between the East-West and the North-South arteries of the Middle East and Persian Gulf areas. Finally, Turkey serves as a barrier which hinders Soviet access to the Mediterranean and the Middle East " CREMASCO, M. (1984) " In political, economic and strategic terms, ...

Chess is a strategic game in which players recognize the threats to their pieces and their opponents' pieces at any given time. Players also evaluate the affect each move will have on the balance of power in the game. Novice players often fail to detect threatened pieces of either color. They also find prediction difficult and frequently neglect to think ahead about the negative ramifications o...

Why do wars continue even when their original causes are resolved? I offer a rationalist explanation: wars end in a negotiated settlement only when wartime and peacetime balances of power are approximately equal. Since fighting tends to shift the wartime balance of power, war creates its own commitment problems which can preclude a peaceful settlement—even after its initial causes have become i...

This paper explores the non-adoption of an innovation via the concept of hybrid genres, that is digital genres that emerge from a non-digital material precedent. As instances of innovation these are often resisted because they disturb the order of activity and balance of power relations in a given situation, or require users to make conceptual and physical adaptation efforts that they consider ...

Theoretical models are often used to analyze reproductive conflicts in animal societies; for example, by determining the different sex-allocation optima of queen and workers. But who is in control (queen or workers, dominant or subordinate) is normally an implicit or explicit assumption of the model. Here, we introduce the concept of power (the ability to do or act in a situation in which confl...

This paper examines different ways of measuring power and the use of these measures in the context of the European Union. The paper deals with classical power indices of co-operative games and more recent non-cooperative a priori measures. Special emphasis of the paper is in inter-institutional balance of power, Nice reforms and eastern enlargement. ∗Earlier version and parts of this paper have...

This paper introduces a class of coalitional games, called pillage games, as a model of Hobbesian anarchy. Any coalition can pillage, costlessly and with certainty, any less powerful coalition. Power is endogenous, so a pillage game does not have a characteristic function, but pillage provides a domination concept that defines a stable set, which represents an endogenous balance of power. Every...