This paper extends the club model of religion to better account for observed patterns of extremism. We adapt existing models to a multi-agent framework and analyze the distribution of agents and clubs. We find that extremism is more successful when religious groups are able to produce close substitutes for standard goods and that increased access to publicly provided goods can reduce the extrem...

A Constitutional Theory of the Family The paper re-examines the idea that a family can be viewed as a community governed by a self-enforcing constitution, and extends existing results in two directions. First, it identifies circumstances in which a constitution is renegotiation-proof. Second, it introduces parental altruism. The behavioural and policy implications are illustrated by showing the...

We consider a broad class of situations where a society must choose from a finite set of alternatives. This class includes, as polar cases, those where the preferences of agents are completely unrestricted and those where their preferences are single-peaked. We prove that strategy-proof mechanisms in all these domains must be based on a generalization of the median voter principle. Moreover, th...

We study decentralized trade processes in general exchange economies and house allocation problems with and without money. The processes are a¤ected by persistent random shocks stemming from agents’maximization of random utility. By imposing structure on the utility noise term –logit distribution–, one is able to calculate exactly the stationary distribution of the perturbed Markov process for ...

A voting protocol is said to be strongly participatory if for any player i and any strategy profile either the outcome is i‘s preferred one or i has a strategy which would ensure her a better outcome, and VNMstrategy proof if at any preference profile the set of sincere strategies of each player is a VNM-stable set. It is shown that the proportional lottery (PL) modular voting protocol is both ...

We investigate the computational complexity of several decision problems in hedonic coalition formation games and demonstrate that attaining stability in such games remains NP-hard even when they are additive. Precisely, we prove that when either core stability or strict core stability is under consideration, the existence problem of a stable coalition structure is NP-hard in the strong sense. ...

I study the strategic incentives to coordinate votes in an assembly. Coalitions form voting blocs, acting as single players and affecting the policy outcome. In an assembly with two exogenous parties I show how the incentives to accept party discipline depend on the types of the agents, the sizes of the parties, and the rules the blocs use to aggregate preferences. In a game of fully endogenous...

Single-plateaued preferences generalize single-peaked preferences by allowing for multiple best elements. These preferences have played an important role in areas such as voting, strategy-proofness and matching problems. We examine the notion of singleplateauedness in a choice-theoretic setting. Single-plateaued choice is characterized by means of a collinear interval continuity property in the...

Discounting the utilities of future people or giving smaller weights to groups other than one’s own is often criticized on the grounds that the resulting objective function differs from the ethically appropriate one. This paper investigates the consequences of changes in the discount factor and weights when they are moved toward the warranted ones. Using the utilitarian value function, it is sh...

We reconsider the problem of ordering infinite utility streams. As has been established in earlier contributions, if no representability condition is imposed, there exist strongly Paretian and finitely anonymous orderings of intertemporal utility streams.We examine the possibility of adding suitably formulated versions of classical equity conditions. First, we provide a characterization of all ...