Sometimes the leaders of ethnic minority groups behave in a way that may promote xenophobia. A simple two-subject model is used to find out when this behaviour is rational. The conditions are briefly discussed with reference to the Italian case. An appendix illustrates the definition of...

he paper describes a program for comparing electoral systems based on the simulation of the preferences of the voters. The parameters requested (distribution of first preferences, district magnitude, etc) are set up by the user. The program produces the resulting Parliament under a number of...

This paper describes a study of the robustness of cooperative conventions. We observe the effect of the invasion of non-cooperating subjects into a community adopting a cooperative convention. The convention is described by an indefinitely repeated prisoner-dilemma game. We check the effects on...

La ricerca si propone di verificare l'universalità dei risultati (e quindi della teoria che li suffraga) di un piccolo ma altamente considerato corpus sperimentale, in base al quale l'erogazione dello sforzo lavorativo e' influenzata negativamente dall'imposizione fiscale. Tale...

The paper describes a simulation program for comparing electoral systems. The user fixes some basic features, like the distribution of first preferences, their peakedness, the dimension of the districts, and so on. The program produces the resulting Parliament under a number of electoral system,...

The paper describes a weighted-voting system for the election of a Parliament. The system is easy to implement, and it dominates plurality, where "dominates" means that it performs better with reference to both representativeness and stability. The system has some other nice properties,namely...

What do indices of disproportionality actually measure? They provide an aggregate estimation of the difference between votes cast and seats assignment, but the relation between the value of the indices and the will of the voters is highly questionable. The reason is that when casting the vote...

This paper deals with what we believe is an important component of human well being, which has been traditionally neglected by economic discourse: the individual’s perception of his/her life’s overall security. Our aim is to study this feature within the framework of the economics...