The origins of electoral systems have received scant attention in the literature. Looking at the history of electoral rules in the advanced world in the last century, this paper shows that the existing wide variation in electoral rules across nations can be traced to the strategic decisions that...

A central authority possessing tax and expenditure responsibilities can readily provide an efficient level of a public good. Absent a central authority, the case with climate change mitigation, voluntary arrangements must replace coercive arrangements; significant under-provision must be...

Why do sudden and massive social, economic, and political changes occur when and where they do? Are there institutional preconditions that encourage such changes when present and discourage such changes when absent? In this paper, I employ a general model which suggests that massive equilibrium...

The Competitive Industrial Performance index (developed by experts of the UNIDO) is designed as a measure of national competitiveness. Index is an aggregate of eight observable variables, representing different dimensions of competitive industrial performance. Instead of using a cardinal...

A growing body of literature studies the effect of providing information about inequality to respondents of surveys on their preferences for redistribution. We provide a meta-analysis combining the results from 84 information treatments coming from 36 studies in Economics, Political Science,...

The Conference of the Parties (COP) has proven a valuable outlet to advance the climate agenda. The combination of high media coverage, extremely high expectations set by influential environmentalists, and unanimity rules has, however, started to limit its effectiveness. Technical issues can...

By examining several different types of open institutions including open source software, open science, open square and (open) urban planning, this paper presents a general analysis of open institutional structure that is complementary to traditional proprietary mode. We argue that open...

Some researchers have addressed the problem of aggregating individual preferences or rankings by seeking a ranking that is closest to the individual rankings. Their methods differ according to the notion of distance that they use. The best known method of this sort is due to Kemeny. The first...

This paper contributes to the debate on the efficacy of IMF's catalytic finance in preventing financial crises. Extending Morris and Shin (2006), we consider that the IMF's intervention policy usually exerts a signaling effect on private creditors and that several interventions in sequence may...