In his inaugural presidential address to the Population Association of America in 1978, Richard Easterlin challenged the orthodox neoclassical economic model of fertility originally suggested by Becker and subsequently elaborated by Becker and Lewis. While maintaining an economic approach to fertility, Easterlin's model was based upon the notion of material aspirations which changed systematic...

Conventional models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when there are multiple district elections for a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter matters: an extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred by the median voter in a majority o...

We consider a multilateral bargaining game in which the agents can be classified into two groups according to their instantaneous preferences. In one of these groups there is one agent with a different discount factor. We analyze how this time-preference heterogeneity may generate multiplicity of equilibria. When such an agent is sufficiently more patient than the rest, there is an equilibrium ...

Extended sexual receptivity in primates is thought to facilitate paternity confusion, thus decreasing the risk of infanticide. However, females might also provide some indication of ovulation to attract preferred males during fertile periods. We examined female mate preferences across defined receptive periods (N = 59) in a group of wild Phayre's leaf monkeys (Trachypithecus phayrei crepusculus...

We examine the effects of various political campaign activities on voter preferences in the domain of US Presidential elections. We construct a comprehensive data set that covers the three most recent elections, with detailed records of voter preferences at the state-week level over an election period. We include various types of the most frequently utilized marketing instruments: two forms of ...

In many interactive decision making scenarios there is often no solution that satisfies all of the user’s preferences. The decision process can be helped by providing explanations. Relaxations show sets of consistent preferences and, thus, indicate which preferences can be enforced, while exclusion sets show which preferences can be relaxed to obtain a solution. We propose a new approach to exp...

We study a model in which voters choose between two candidates on the basis of both ideology and competence. While the ideology of the candidates is commonly known, voters are imperfectly informed about competence. Voter preferences, however, are such that it is a dominant strategy to vote according to ideology alone. When voting is compulsory, the candidate of the majority ideology prevails an...

We prove that a universal preference type space exists under much more general conditions than those postulated by Epstein and Wang (1996). To wit, it is enough that preferences can be encoded by a countable collection of continuous functionals, while the preferences themselves need not necessarily be continuous or regular, like, e.g., in the case of lexicographic preferences. The proof relies ...