The purpose of this dissertation is to examine a participation problem in a mechanism to produce a (pure) public good. The public good is one which satisfies non-excludability and non-rivalry: all agents can consume the same amount of a public good regardless of their contribution to it. Therefore, every agent has an incentive to free-ride the public good that is produced by other agents. As a ...

Behavioral hypotheses have recently been introduced into public-choice theory (Ostrom in American Political Science Review 92:1–22, 1998). Nevertheless, the individual intrinsic preferences which drive decisions in social dilemmas have not yet been empirically identified. This paper asks whether risk and inequity preferences are behind agents’ behavior in a sequential public good game. The expe...

In an earlier valuation study two of the authors encountered questions from about 20% of the focus group members on the lines: "When I answer your questions should I wear my private (consumer) hat or my public (citizen) hat?". Even though the presence of "public" or altruistic preferences and of multiple preference orderings has achieved attention in the literature over several decades, little ...

BACKGROUND Decision makers often assume they know the public's standpoints and see themselves as capable of representing them. The aim of this study is to assess the level of acquaintance that senior decision-makers in the Israeli health system have concerning the priorities of the public in whose name they act. METHODS A phone survey was conducted with a representative population sample and ...

This article offers a brief comparative look at American and British jurisprudential pending selection reforms, and argues that American states could improve their appointive systems by incorporating modern personnel recruitment and hiring practices. To restore public confidence in the courts, people must believe that judges exercise legitimate authority, undistorted by personal or partisan pre...

We propose a theory of strategic voting in multi-winner elections with approval balloting: A fixed number  of candidates are to be elected; each voter votes for as many candidates as she wants; the  candidates with the most votes are elected. We assume that voter preferences are separable and that there exists a tiny probability that any vote might be misrecorded. Best responses involve votin...

In “The Logic of Campaigning”, Dean and Parikh consider a candidate making campaign statements to appeal to the voters. They model these statements as Boolean formulas over variables that represent stances on the issues, and study optimal candidate strategies under three proposed models of voter preferences based on the assignments that satisfy these formulas. We prove that voter utility evalua...