Is There a Social Security Tax Wedge? A Beveridgean pension scheme invariably introduces a wedge between the wage rate and the marginal take-home pay. A Bismarckian one can do so only if it is not actuarially fair, or in the presence of credit rationing. Interestingly, if the two possible sources of distortion are present at the same time, they will tend to offset each other. The distortion may...

Failure to express minority views may distort the behavior of company boards, committees, juries, and other decision-making bodies. Devising a new experimental procedure to measure such conformity in a judgment task, we compare the degree of conformity in groups with varying gender composition. Overall, our experiments offer little evidence that gender composition affects expression of minority...

BACKGROUND The existence of deficits in several social cognitive domains has been established in schizophrenia, and those impairments are known to be a significant determinant of functional outcome. Both symptoms and neurocognition have been linked to social cognitive deficits, but the nature and the relative strength of these relationships have not been established. METHODS A meta-analysis o...

How should one aggregate ordinal preferences expressed by voters into a measurably superior social choice? A well-established approach — which we refer to as implicit utilitarian voting — assumes that voters have latent utility functions that induce the reported rankings, and seeks voting rules that approximately maximize utilitarian social welfare. We extend this approach to the design of rule...

ethan kohlberg, the jewish orientalist and specialist on shi‘a, sees the distortion in holy scriptures, including quran, inevitable. from his point of view, some quranic verses confirm this point. his second proof is the history of the quran and the time when its whole text was written down. in his viewpoint,   hadiths which prove that the quran had been written down in abu bakr’s time ore orie...

This paper examines the influence of social norms on obesity. We introduce a concept norm related to distortion in weight perception and developed through shared experiences environment with high prevalence The theoretical model shows that, when obesity is common, it less likely be recognized as an issue, its commonality mitigates individual’s health concerns. Using regional data from Health Su...