Fang and Casadevall present some excellent arguments for using a modified lottery to fund medical research (1). Research on research funding is ironically thin on the ground, but what research there is has identified significant biases and huge inefficiencies in current funding systems. If the current predominant model of funding through peer review (based on lengthy written application forms a...

We argue that the history of political diversity in social psychology may be better characterized by stability than by a large shift toward liberalism. The branch of social psychology that focuses on political issues has defined social problems from a liberal perspective since at least the 1930s. Although a lack of ideological diversity within the discipline can pose many of the problems noted ...

We consider one-to-one matching (roommate) problems in which agents (students) can either be matched as pairs or remain single. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we review a key result for roommate problems (the “lonely wolf” theorem) for which we provide a concise and elementary proof. Second, and related to the title of this paper, we show how the often incompatible concepts of stabili...

We thank Dr. Barnett for his kind comments (1). We agree that a major barrier to instituting a modified lottery is political, since government agencies are reluctant to acknowledge that peer review is unable to reliably stratify applications. It is counterintuitive that experts are little better than a random selection process at predicting the future success of proposals, even though the data ...

In normative public economics, inter-governmental competition is usually viewed as harmful. Although empirical support for this position does not abound, market integration has intensi ̄ed competition among developed countries. In this paper we argue that when assessing welfare e®ects of inter-governmental competition for various forms of government imperfections (the public choice critique), th...

Let us start from a simple and common sense definition of the concept of a „problem‟: One has a problem when one experiences a gap or disparity between a moral standard and an image of a present or future state of the world. Someone who claims to be plagued by a problem, implicitly or explicitly passes a moral judgment. One uses a standard involving value or worthlessness, desirability or undes...

The vast majority of advertising expenditures in congressional campaigns are made not directly by campaigns themselves but indirectly though specialist intermediary firms. Though their revenue ultimately derives from contributions to public campaigns, these firms are privately owned and operated on a for-profit basis. Using a new dataset that includes both revenues and costs of these firms, we ...

Although relations between political violence and child adjustment are well documented, longitudinal research is needed to adequately address the many questions remaining about the contexts and developmental trajectories underlying the effects on children in areas of political violence. The study examined the relations between sectarian and nonsectarian community violence and adolescent adjustm...

Limited dependent variable (LDV) data are common in political science, and political methodologists have given much good advice on dealing with them. We review some methods for LDV ‘‘change point problems’’ and demonstrate the use of Bayesian approaches for count, binary, and duration-type data. Our applications are drawn from American politics, Comparative politics, and International Political...