The theoretical virtue of parsimony values the minimizing of theoretical commitments, but theoretical commitments come in two kinds: ontological and ideological. While the ontological commitments of a theory are the entities it posits, a theory’s ideological commitments are the primitive concepts it employs. Here, I show how we can extend the distinction between quantitative and qualitative par...

We study lobbying with information in a setting where politicians are connected through a network describing information flows. There are two opposing lobby groups, who choose which politician to address. The decision depends on the ideological bias of politicians as well as the overall network structure. We show that there is an interplay between the strength of the network, as given by the in...

Recent research has shown dramatic benefits to incorporating social media in public facing websites. Using a perspective based on the duality of goals, we argue that social media, with emphasis on facilitating visitors’ unconstrained exchanges, may undermine the communicative purpose of an organization’s website and may not be desirable in some cases. We tested these ideas by examining the soci...

The development and continuous improvement of campus networks brings new changes to the campus and college life, more and more students are turning to micro-blog to express their views and opinions, and through the micro blogging to achieve fast and efficient sharing and exchange of information and resources. In the micro blog era, the power of micro blogging can not only impact college student...

In this paper we propose a model in which there are ideological and strategic voters who vote under poportional rule. We prove that the behavior of ideological voters matters for the determination of the outcome. We show that a subset of strategic voters partially counteracts the votes of the ideological voters. JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D72.