In this note we consider a society that partitions itself into disjoint jurisdictions, each choosing a location of its public project and a taxation scheme to finance it. The set of public project is multi-dimensional, and their costs could vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. We impose two...

Consider a population of citizens uniformly spread over the entire plane, that faces a problem of locating public facilities to be used by its members. The cost of every facility is financed by its users, who also face an idiosyncratic private access cost to the facility. We assume that the...

We consider a model of the 'world' with several regions that may create a unified entity or be partitioned into several unions (countries). The regions have distinct preferences over policies chosen in the country to which they belong and equally share the cost of public policies. It is known...

This paper examines the lasting impact of the alignment of African countries during the Cold War on their modern economic development. We find that the division of the continent into two blocs (East/West) led to two clusters of development outcomes that reflect the Cold War's ideological divide....

In this note, we use the technique of option sets to sort out the implications of coalitional strategyproofness in the spatial setting. We also discuss related issues and open problems.

We analyze and evaluate the different decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to date. All the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue that the nucleolus can be...

We explore the evolutionary dynamics of a population that consists of cooperators and defectors, wherein each member of the many pairs of players of a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game is drawn at random, and the number of descendents positively depends on the payoffs in the game. We demonstrate...

A mechanism guarantees a certain welfare level to its agents, if each of them can secure that level against unanimously adversarial others. How high can such a guarantee be, and what type of mechanism achieves it? In the n-person probabilistic voting/bargaining model with p deterministic...

Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but need, in most cases, to be translated. According to some authors, this may lead to a form of cultural domination of English. The population speaking English as a first language is, with the exception of Mandarin, the largest in the...

We examine patterns of acquiring non-native languages in a model with two languages and two populations with heterogeneous learning skills, where every individual faces a binary choice of learning the foreign language or refraining from doing so. We show that both interior and corner linguistic...