If each member of a group assigns a certain probability to a hypothesis, what probability should the collective as a whole assign? More generally, how should individual probability functions be merged into a single collective one? I investigate this question in case that the individual...

We model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote. We adopt a number of simplifying assumptions: the founders and the candidates are fixed; the society operates for $k$ periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period; one vote is...

We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of...

The article proposes an enabling mechanism for the creation, adjustment and dissolution of governmental units, giving autonomy to each resident as in a direct democracy. Rather than focusing on a narrow model with restrictive and specialized assumptions, and subsequent solutions, as has been...

The paper presents an index of globalization covering its three main dimensions: economic integration, social integration, and political integration. Using panel data for 123 countries in 1970-2000 the effects of the overall index of globalization as well as sub-indexes constructed to measure...

Conventional wisdom has it that policy innovation is better promoted in a federal rather than in a unitary system. Recent research, however, has provided theoretical evidence to the contrary: a multi-jurisdictional system is characterized---due to the existence of a horizontal information...

Increasingly, in regional agreements, large economies, e.g. U.S. and E.U., offer lower trade barriers in exchange for cooperation by small economies in environmental, intellectual property and other issues. What is the effect of such agreements on multilateral trade liberalization? We show that,...

The paper derives a normative model for partial fiscal equalisation based on a number of axioms and makes special allowance for the existence of a specific fiscal need in the jurisdictions. A simple version of this idealised equalisation scheme relates net contri-butions to the equalisation...

This work is a contribution to the Second Generation Theory (SGT) of fiscal federalism that studies fiscal federalism through contemporary economic and industrial organization theory. First, it establishes context by introducing the two classic motivations in support of federalism, namely,...