G et ready! The landscape in medicine is probably going to change rapidly. The starting bell rang in December 2010 in Washington, DC, with very little fanfare when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned doctors from prescribing Avastin to patients with advanced-stage breast cancer. 1 Avastin, a potent but costly drug, has worked in some clinical trials by halting the spread of cancer and...

The past three years have seen political volatility rising against a backdrop of improving economic growth across the major regions and increasingly becalmed financial markets. How does economic output correlate with voter behavior? As globalization slows, the transition away from "globalization" toward a more decisively multipolar world is an emerging trend that will shape politics. In this es...

The paper analyzes a political accountability game with an electorate of ’partisan’ and ’independent’ voters. It is shown that politicians have a strategic incentive to engage in ’divisive politics’, that is, to force some independent voters to take sides, even if the direct electoral benefits are higher for their opponents than for themselves. By polarizing the electorate, the incumbent politi...

ii Introduction In 1997, a person born in Luxembourg could expect to receive during his lifetime an average real income that would allow him to purchase goods for a value roughly 66 times as high as that of a person born in Ethiopia. The citizen of Luxembourg would also be able to enjoy the goods purchased with that income for a oonger amount of time: she could expect to live 76 years, while an...

The aim of this study was to examine the complex interactions between political traditions, policies, and public health outcomes, and to find out whether different political traditions have been associated with systematic patterns in population health over time. We analysed a number of political, economic, social, and health variables over a 50-year period, in a set of wealthy countries belongi...

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This paper compares the economic efficiency of firm-agency governance structures for pollution reduction using transaction costs economics. Two governance structures are analyzed with the transaction costs approach: command and control regulation (CCR) and negotiated agreements (NAs). We propose that the choice of governance structure depends on the strategies firms pursue given the attributes ...

The application of game theory—and an alternative strategic theory called “theory of moves”—and social-choice theory to a wide variety of strategic situations, principally but not exclusively in politics, will be studied. Uses of strategy in voting in committees and elections, in political campaigns, in the defense and deterrence policies of nations, and in bargaining and coalition-building sit...

Definitions of power abound. German sociologist, Max Weber defined power as "the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance." Along similar lines, Emerson suggests that "The power of actor A over actor B is the amount of resistance on the part of B which can be potentially overcome by A." Power appears to involve on...