We delineate three mechanisms that could explain women's under-representation in electoral lists and political power: voter demand, candidate supply, and internal party dynamics. We use Spain's Equality Law, which mandates a 40 percent female quota on electoral lists, to test these alternative theories. The law was enacted by the Social-Democratic Party after the surprise parliamentary electora...

Freud’s assumption that the Oedipal relationship plays an important part in shaping the future character of mate choice needs a scientific reconsideration that, in turn, requires setting an empirically testable explanation. The authors hypothesize that the close physical and emotional attachment between the mother and her son includes a sexual imprinting-like mechanism that influences the proce...

Indeterminate preferences have long been a tricky subject for choice theory. One reason for which preferences may be less than fully determinate is the lack of confidence in one’s preferences. In this paper, a representation of confidence in preferences is proposed. It is used to develop an account of the role which confidence which rests on the following intuition: the more important the decis...

Decision making has proposed multiple methods to help the decision maker in his analysis, by suggesting ways of formalization of the preferences as well as the assessment of the uncertainties. Although these techniques are established and proven to be mathematically sound, experience has shown that in certain situations we tend to avoid the formal approach by acting intuitively. Especially, whe...

With personalisation becoming more prevalent, it can often be useful to be able to infer additional preferences from input user preferences. Preference inference techniques assume a set of possible user preference models, and derive inferences that hold in all models satisfying the inputs; the more restrictive one makes the set of possible user preference models, the more inferences one gets. S...

We study rankings of completely and partially diversified portfolios and also of specialized assets when investors follow so-called Markowitz preferences. It turns out that diversification strategies for Markowitz investors are more complex than in the case of risk-averse and risk-inclined investors, whose investment strategies have been extensively investigated in the literature. In particular...

We study computational problems for two popular parliamentary voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the successive procedure. While finding successful manipulations or agenda controls is tractable for both procedures, our real-world experimental results indicate that most elections cannot be manipulated by a few voters and agenda control is typically impossible. If the voter preference...

Preferences for redistribution may be influenced by values and beliefs about distributive justice as well as by self-interest. People may prefer more redistribution to the poor if they believe that poverty is caused by circumstances beyond individual control. Therefore, beliefs about the causes of income may affect demand for redistribution. Alternatively, the effect of these beliefs on redistr...

This paper studies strict preference relations on product sets induced by “ordinal aggregation methods”. Such methods are interpreted here as performing paired comparisons of alternatives based on the “importance” of attributes favoring each element of the pair: alternative x will be preferred to alternative y if the attributes for which x is better than y are “more important” than the attribut...

A classic issue in the theory of rational choice is whether individuals’ preferences should and can be measured. This paper suggests that studies of altruistic behavior will benefit from trying to measure altruistic preferences. Such an effort would enable scholars to test the separate effect of preferences and situational factors on action. The above suggestions are applied to the case of the ...