Most important results in Social Choice Theory concern impossibility theorems. They claim that no function, as complex as it might be, can satisfy simultaneously a restricted number of fair properties describing a democratic system. However, adopting new voting ideas can push back those limits....

The official results analysis of the Congolese presidential elections in 2011 aims at studying behavior displayed by voters towards the selected mode of poll. This reveals that most of them carry out a strategic vote because feeling, in an intuitive way, weaknesses of a single member voting...

We develop a model of the household in which spousal incomes are determined by pre-marital investments, the marriage market is characterized by assortative matching, and endogenously-determined sharing rules form the basis of intra-household allocations. By incorporating pre-marital investments...

Can households make efficient choices? The fact that cohabitation and marriage are partnerships for joint production and consumption imply that their gains are highest when household members cooperate. At the same time, empirical findings suggest that spousal specialization and labor force...

This paper combines partner matching with an intra-household allocation model where couples decide if they want to marry or cohabitate. Marriage encourages but does not ensure a higher level of spousal commitment, which in turn can generate a larger marital surplus. Individuals' marital...

Zeno's paradoxes of motion, which claim that moving from one point to another cannot be accomplished in finite time, seem to be of serious concern when moving towards an agreement is concerned. Parkinson's Law of Triviality implies that such an agreement cannot be reached in finite time. By...

In many economic environments agents make costly and irreversible investments (in "guns") that may enhance their respective threat payoffs but also shrink the utility possibilities set. In such settings, with variable threats and a variable utility possibilities set, it becomes possible to rank...

To facilitate the study of contests in general equilibrium, we examine winner-take-all contests in which the prize is complemenatry to the effort of the contestants, as inputs are in production functions or final goods in utility functions. We focus on the effects of technological factors and...

Can households make efficient choices? The fact that cohabitation and marriage are partnerships for joint production and consumption imply that their gains are highest when household members cooperate. At the same time, empirical findings suggest that spousal specialization and labor force...