The European Union (EU) is assumed to suffer from a democratic deficit whereas there is only weak and indirect connection between public preferences and policy change. This paper investigates empirically whether any relationship exists between public support for European integration and EU policy output (1973-2008). Using a new indicator of policy output the volume of important legislation prod...

Groves and Ledyard (1977) construct a mechanism for public goods procurement that can be viewed as a direct-revelation Groves mechanism in which agents announce a parameter of a quadratic approximation of their true preferences. The mechanism’s Nash equilibrium outcomes are efficient. The budget is balanced because Groves mechanisms are balanced for the announced quadratic preferences. Tian (19...

Economics, and law and economics, assume that preferences are fixed and not constructed. The assumption is unrealistic, they acknowledge, but is nevertheless useful for generating accurate predictions. They assume as well that having fixed preferences with the other attributes accorded to them under rational choice theory is normatively desirable. Both these assumptions are false. It is critica...

There is increasing evidence that animals can acquire mate preferences through the use of public information, notably by observing (and copying) the mate preferences of others in the population. If females acquire preferences through social mechanisms, sexual selection could act very rapidly to spread the preference and drive elaboration of the preferred trait(s). Although there are reports of ...

We conduct an artefactual field experiment to compare the individual preferences and propensity to cooperate of three pools of subjects: Undergraduate students, temporary workers and permanent workers. We find that students are more selfish and contribute less than workers. Temporary and permanent contract workers have similar other-regarding preferences and display analogous contribution patte...

Societies prohibit many transactions considered morally repugnant, although potentially efficiency-enhancing. We conducted an online choice experiment to characterize preferences for the morality and efficiency of payments to kidney donors. Preferences were heterogeneous, ranging from deontological to strongly consequentialist; the median respondent would support payments by a public agency if ...

This paper highlights the research for year one of the Preferences for Global Access (PGA) project whose long term goal is to define a cross-platform preference acquisition system to acquire a user’s needs and preferences for accessing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as part of a cloudbased Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII).

McKinsey–Tarski (1944), Shehtman (1999), and Lucero-Bryan (2011) proved completeness theorems for modal logics with modalities 2, 2 and ∀, and [∂] and ∀, respectively, with topological semantics over the real numbers. We give short proofs of these results using lexicographic sums of linear orders.

The paper investigates the public’s attitude towards monetary union arrangements associated with different levels of monetary policy autonomy. The results indicate that support for monetary union declines significantly with expected loss of autonomy. Survey data from Kenya shows that public support for the proposed East African Community monetary union is highest in an arrangement where the cou...