The purpose of this paper is to provide a normative analysis of some migration issues. Our main objective is to develop a social-choice theoretical framework to evaluate alternative immigration policies of a country. For illustrative purposes, we present some simple results that are characterizations of some policy evaluation functions that have some specific features. JEL Classification Number...

People are sometimes risk-averse in gains but risk-loving in losses. Such behavior and other anomalies underlying prospect theory arise from a model of local status maximization in which consumers compare their wealth with other consumers of similar wealth. This social explanation shares key features with the psychological explanation offered by Kahneman and Tversky. JEL Classification: D81, D11

Do the Reciprocal Trust Less? We study the intrapersonal relationship between trust and reciprocity in a laboratory experiment. Reciprocal subjects trust significantly more than selfish ones. This finding raises questions about theories of social preferences which predict that “fairer” players should trust less. JEL Classification: C91, D63

This is a review essay, based on a critical assessment of The Ant Trap by Brian Epstein. Epstein argues that models in the social sciences are inadequate because they are based on a false ontology of methodological individualism, and proposes a new model of social ontology. I examine this model and point to flaws in it. More generally, I argue against Epstein’s methodological approach, which tr...

We seed noisy information to members of a real-world social network to study how information diffusion and information aggregation jointly shape social learning. Our environment features substantial social learning. We show that learning occurs via diffusion which is highly imperfect: signals travel only up to two steps in the conversation network and indirect signals are transmitted noisily. W...

The ‘rational addiction’ model of cigarette smoking downplays the influence of social factors and biological dependency. This paper develops a simple model of these factors and presents some causality tests that indicate that nicotine content ‘causes’ smoking with the direction being negative. ©2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D12; J12

The extent of genetic diversity in food crops is important as it affects the risk of attack by pathogens. A drop in diversity increases this risk. Farmers may not take this into account when making crop choices, leading to what from a social perspective is an inadequate level of diversity. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: Q1; Q2; C72

This paper uses an axiomatic approach to study the properties of voting procedures. We propose a new axiom, called “group support,” which requires that an alternative that is selected by a society must be selected by some subgroup of the society. We show that group support and faithfulness characterize a class of scoring rules that we call topheavy rules. JEL Classification: D71

It is vividly debated how the ongoing process of European integration will a¤ect the need and scope for welfare state activities. To some this process signals that welfare state activities have to be rolled back, while others stress that international integration may increase the need for (explicit or implicit) social insurance arrangements. This paper discusses these issues by first considerin...

We explore theoretically and empirically whether social interaction, including local and global interaction, influences the incidence of corruption. We first present an interaction-based model on corruption that predicts that the level of corruption is positively associated with social interaction. Then we empirically verify the theoretical prediction using within-country evidence at the provin...