This paper investigates whether individuals feel worse off when others around them earn more. In other words, do people care about relative position, and does “lagging behind the Joneses” diminish well-being? To answer this question, I match individual-level data containing various indicators of well-being to information about local average earnings. I find that, controlling for an individual's own income, higher earnings of neighbors are associated...

This paper advances an “information goods” theory that explains prestige processes as an emergent product of psychological adaptations that evolved to improve the quality of information acquired via cultural transmission. Natural selection favored social learners who could evaluate potential models and copy the most successful among them. In order to improve the fidelity and comprehensiveness of such ranked-biased copying, social learners further evolved dispositions to...

Awards in the form of orders, medals, decorations, prizes, and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, and not-for-profit and profit-oriented firms. Nevertheless, this kind of nonmaterial extrinsic incentive has been given little attention in the social sciences, including psychology. The demand for awards relies on an individual's desire for distinction, and the supply of awards is governed by the desire to motivate....

Referenda and initiatives are hardly considered as democratic devices for a future Europe. Drawing on experimental evidence and empirical findings for Switzerland, the authors argue that direct democracy performs well for the provision of public goods and redistribution as it institutionalizes the political discussion. Communication induces the citizens to transform a public decision into a private choice and to break the politician's agenda-setting monopoly: relevant...

First, the approaches of 'Diskursethik' (Discourse ethics) and of Modern Political Economy are described. While the latter investigates political decision processes, the former is concerned with the discourse process which takes place before a decision is made. This is shown by using referenda as an example. The discourse which takes place before referenda obviously does not conform to the ideal conditions defined in Diskursethik, but...

This paper extends Stigler and Peltzman's approach to regulation by incorporating a legislature. The model yields comparative statics results and hence testable implications. The paper then tests between two opposing approaches about regulatory agency behavior. The first assumes agencies operate independently of the legislature and hence exercise discretion; the second assumes that Congress controls agency decisions. The recent behavior of the Federal Trade Commission provides...

Some readers may have found these results of greater interest were we able to confirm the directional hypotheses of the certainty setter model in addition to finding that spending is “related” to the reversion – the much weaker prediction of the uncertainty model. Yet the failure of the certainty When base elections were optional, their infrequent occurrence might be expected under either a median voter or...

Financial support was provided, in part, by The Spencer Foundation. We thank M. Harris, J. Lave, S. Salop, and participants in workshops at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and at Queen’s University for helpful comments.  Romer, T., &Rosenthal, H. (1978). Political resource allocation, controlled agendas, and the status quo. Public choice, 33(4), 27-43.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03187594 

초록 없음   Olson, M. (1969). The principle of" fiscal equivalence": the division of responsibilities among different levels of government. The American economic review, 479-487. 

초록 없음  Buchanan, J. M. (1965). An economic theory of clubs. Economica, 32(125), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.2307/2552442