Most of the voting models restrict themselves to the analysis of symmetric equilibria, i.e. equilibria in which ‘similar’ voters make ‘similar’ voting decisions. In this paper we investigate this assumption under costly plurality voting. In any pure strategy equilibrium, if two active...

We study Downsian competition in a Mirrleesian model of income taxation. The competing politicians may dier in competence. If politicians engage in vote-share maximization, the less competent politician's policy proposals are attractive to the minority of rich agents, whereas those of the...

We study the strategic behavior of voters in a model of proportional representation, in which the policy space is multidimensional. Our main finding is that in large electorate, under some assumptions on voters'preferences, voters essentially vote, in any equilibrium, only for the extreme parties.

The South African government has set as a policy objective the halving of poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article frames government’s stated target of halving poverty by 2014 in terms of specific measures of the poverty gap and poverty...

Unemployment and earnings inequality have moved closely together in South Africa in recent years, suggesting that there may not be a trade-off between them as the literature generally suggests. This article explores the relationship between unemployment and earnings inequality in South Africa,...

Non-uniform indirect taxes treat equals and those unequal differently (horizontal inequity and vertical redistribution). Horizontal inequity is caused by taste differences among similar households, but some excises are designed to reflect social, not revealed, preferences. We apply two...

In multi-unit auctions, such as auctions of commodities and securities, and financial exchanges, it is necessary to specify rationing rules to break ties between multiple marginal bids. The standard approach in the literature and in pratice is to ration marginal bids proportionally. This paper...

Returns-based beliefs provides an explanation for the anomaly between the theory and empirics for the one-shot and finitely-repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma games. Even in a fully specified game, there is strategic uncertainty as players attempt to coordinate their actions. Therefore players form...

This paper addresses the effects of multimarket contact on firms’ ability to collude. Real world imperfections tend to makes firms’ objective function strictly concave and market supergames ‘interdependent’: firms’ payoffs in each market depend on how they are doing in others. Then,...