Market mechanisms provide an efficient institution for allocating service offers and requests. In doing so, negotiations between the market participants play a crucial role. However, current policy languages are ill-suited to realize beneficial trade-offs within a negotiation, since they support only boolean decisions. Therefore, we suggest an approach where preferences are modeled as utility f...

We analyse the optimal level of political decision making, national or regional. The benefit of policy making at the regional level is that it allows for policy differentiation, which serves the interests of regional majorities. The argument in favor of a national policy is that it may generate a more moderate policy, which protects the interests of regional minorities. Our paper analyses how t...

Monetary policy objectives and targets are not necessarily constant over time. The regime-switching literature has typically analyzed and interpreted changes in policymakers’ behavior through simple interest rate rules. This paper analyzes policy regime-switches by explicitly modeling policymakers’ behavior and objectives. We show that changes in the parameters of simple rules do not necessaril...

We model political competition as a contest between parties that represent constituents, and which announce policies in a two-dimensional policy space; the first dimension concerns the degree of redistribution, and the second, the race or immigration issue. Given the distribution of voter preferences on this space, a political equilibrium is determined. We study the effect that racist or anti-i...

We introduce a general framework in which politicians choose a (possibly infinite) sequence of binary policies. The two competing candidates are exogenously committed to particular actions on a subset of these issues, while they can choose any policy for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. Citizens have general preferences over policies, and the distribution of preferenc...

To what extent do preferences for redistribution reflect the private self-interest of the voter? Many political economy models assume that once private self-interest is properly accounted for, the residual variation in preferences for redistribution is negligible. Many theories outside of the traditional political economy literature assume that private self-interest is one among several motivat...

Today, the preferences and participation of the TD groups such as the elderly and disabled is still lacking in decision-making of transportation planning, and their reactions to certain type of policies are not well known. Thus, a clear methodology is needed. This study aimed to develop a method to extract the preferences of the disabled to be used in the policy-making stage that can also guide...

The economic theory of federalism is largely built around the premise that more heterogeneous preferences result in more decentralized policy making. Despite its prominence and importance, this central tenet of economic federalism has never been empirically evaluated. This paper presents the first formal test of the link between preference heterogeneity and endogenous policy decentralization us...

Many machine learning approaches in robotics, based on reinforcement learning, inverse optimal control or direct policy learning, critically rely on robot simulators. This paper investigates a simulatorfree direct policy learning, called Preference-based Policy Learning (PPL). PPL iterates a four-step process: the robot demonstrates a candidate policy; the expert ranks this policy comparatively...

This article offers a brief comparative look at American and British jurisprudential pending selection reforms, and argues that American states could improve their appointive systems by incorporating modern personnel recruitment and hiring practices. To restore public confidence in the courts, people must believe that judges exercise legitimate authority, undistorted by personal or partisan pre...