In my 1992 paper in Economic Notes, I argued that the traditional heuristic interpretation of taxes in the pivotal mechanism (in terms of the utility loss imposed by the taxed individual on the rest of society) is not correct, since it takes into account only the effect that the individual has on the decision concerning the project and disregards the effect that the same individual has on the t...

In this paper we quantify the total cost of an epidemic spreading through a social network, accounting for both the immunization and disease costs. Previous research has typically focused on determining the optimal strategy to limit the lifetime of a disease, without considering the cost of such strategies. In the large graph limit, we calculate the exact expected disease cost for a general ran...

This paper investigates the private provision of public goods in segregated societies. While most research agrees that segregation undermines public goods provision the findings are mixed for private provision: social interactions, being strong within groups and limited across groups, may either increase or impede voluntary contributions. Surprisingly, very little light is shed in the literatur...

High social rank is expected to incur fitness costs under unstable social conditions. A disruption of the oxidative balance may underlie such effects, but how markers of oxidative stress vary in relation to social rank and stability is unknown. We examined in mandrills whether the mating season characterized by social instability between males (but not between females) affected their oxidative ...

Coase always expressed dissatisfaction with neo-classical economics and advocated for a new approach. Rather than using toy mathematical models built from unrealistic, idealized assumptions, Coase preferred to study real-world contexts, including actual legal cases. He demonstrated the utility of his approach in ‘The Problem of Social Cost’. Yet almost all of Coase’s contemporaries completely i...

OBJECTIVE To compare the cost effectiveness of social behaviour and network therapy, a new treatment for alcohol problems, with that of the proved motivational enhancement therapy. DESIGN Cost effectiveness analysis alongside a pragmatic randomised trial. SETTING Seven treatment sites around Birmingham, Cardiff, and Leeds. PARTICIPANTS 742 clients with alcohol problems; 617 (83.2%) were i...

BACKGROUND Studies of cost-effective disease prevention have typically focused on the tradeoff between the cost of disease transmission and the cost of applying control measures. We present a novel approach that also accounts for the cost of social disruptions resulting from the spread of disease. These disruptions, which we call social response, can include heightened anxiety, strain on health...

We examine the quality of social choice mechanisms using a utilitarian view, in which all of the agents have costs for each of the possible alternatives. While these underlying costs determine what the optimal alternative is, they may be unknown to the social choice mechanism; instead the mechanism must decide on a good alternative based only on the ordinal preferences of the agents which are i...