Current research refers to videogames as a constant variable. However, games today are designed to be highly interactive and versatile: two players may be using the same videogame, but as a result of different using patterns, the game will not necessarily encompass the same content and gameplay. The current study examined the possible relationship between psychopathology and in-game playing pat...

Timothy Besley’s Principled Agents? carefully surveys the modern social science literature on political agency problems and tries to chart a sensible middle course between the naive assumption that politicians maximize the public welfare and the pessimism of Virginia-style public choice. However, the literature that Besley showcases is seriously flawed. By building on the empirically discredite...

We consider one-to-one, one-sided matching (roommate) problems in which agents can either be matched as pairs or remain single. We introduce a so-called bi-choice graph for each pair of stable matchings and characterize its structure. Exploiting this structure we obtain as a corollary the “lone wolf” theorem and a decomposability result. The latter result together with transitivity of blocking ...

Institutional theory in political science has made great advances in recent years, but also has a number of significant theoretical and methodological problems. The most important of these problems is the generally static nature of institutional explanations. Also, there is a nagging problem of the difficulties in measuring institutional variables in other than simplistic, nominal categories. A...

The economic crisis beginning in 2008 brought into high relief problems in the Italian political economy that had been smoldering for a while. But these were exacerbated by a center-right government under the political leadership of Berlusconi that did little to stem the decline in economic competitiveness, the shrinking of domestic wealth, and the explosion of youth and female unemployment, le...

Reputational Concerns in Political Agency Models Andrew Yuichi Lemon 2005 Citizens in democracies can be thought of as hiring politicians to run the government. In this sense, elections are contracts. The citizens are the principals and retain politicians as agents who are responsible for making policy decisions. Provided politicians value holding office in the future, elections generate incent...

The process of making complex and controversial decisions, that is, dealing with moral or ethical dilemmas, have intrigued people and inspired writers from time immemorial. Dilemmas give both color and depth to characters in good literary works. But beyond literary fiction, dilemmas occupy society in every day issues such as in introducing legislation or solving current political problems. One ...

filled with a number of environmental, economic, and political crises that may indicate an irreversible change in the course of history. A major increase in consumption of natural resources, driven largely by the accelerating globalization and the rapid spread of industrialization, particularly in China and India, has tightened world markets, caused dramatic mineral price fluctuations, and even...