This paper reconsiders the relationship between the rules of a game and its outcomes. The authors develop a notion of rule reform that leads to the selection of Pareto improved equilibria points. They then apply this notion to a series of naturally occurring fishing rules, including examples...

In this paper, the problem of the Paretian liberal is cast as a preference revelation game whose outcome function satisfies Gibbard's libertarian condition and strong Pareto optimality. Strategic consistency requires that the equilibrium of the game agree with the sincere outcome. It is shown...

In a spoils system, it is axiomatic that ‘to the winners go the spoils.’ This essay formalizes spoils systems as cooperative games, with winners given by a simple game structure, and represented by a fixed number of political appointments. We analyze the resulting spoils games by means of...

In the paradigm social choice problem, there is a fixed set of alternatives and a fixed set of voters. This essay considers variations of the electorate when some subset of voters has a special voice on some subset of alternatives. We formalized such a situation by means of the veto function. We...

Our analysis of a game-theoretic model of liberal rights had two main purposes: First, we gave a characterization of Gibbard's solution to the liberal paradox in terms of a game equilibrium. Secondly, we asked for preference restrictions that can guarantee the existence of a Pareto-optimal...

The most important single observation from this research is the similarity between our wide range of results and the multitude of seemingly divergent conclusions about free riding from previous experimental results. Even when defined in the restrictive manner of this paper, free riding is...