Existing work has established that clientelistic parties can maximize their returns by targeting poor voters, because their votes are “cheaper” in the sense that the value of a gift is elastic and the diminishing marginal utility of income implies that a gift of a given monetary value will be worth more to a poorer voter. I examine the The Calculus of Vote-Selling: Electoral Trust and the Value...

[T]he income and happiness relationship is . . . curvilinear . . . with a decreasing marginal utility for higher levels of income . . . . (Diener, Sandvik, Seidlitz, and Diener, 1993, 204; cf. also Diener and Biswas-Diener, 2002, 119) [W]e not only see a clear positive relationship [between happiness and GNP per capita], but also a curvilinear pattern; which suggest that wealth is subject to a ...

What value should we put on chances? This paper examines the hypothesis that, contra the widely accepted theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern, chances can have diminishing marginal value. The hypothesis is defended by showing that it can be used to explain both the typical pattern of preferences observed in the Ellsberg paradox and the intuition that lotteries are the best way to distribute in...

Multiple-attribute decision making in the presence of independence between attributes, the shortage of quantitative value of one attribute can be compensated with that of other attributes. But, many a times, this is not true. On another side, the quantitative value of one attribute is treated as equally important in different intervals. However, this violates the law of diminishing marginal rat...

Product bundles may consist of multiple units of a single product (" uniform " bundles) or multiple units of more than one product (" mixed " bundles). In this paper, we examine consumer evaluations of mixed and uniform bundles. Two factors can explain preferences for mixed bundles. First, consumers may perceive each additional unit of a particular product as possessing less marginal value. Sec...