Journal articlePublic Choice · March 1, 2025
Vernon Smith has been a pioneer in demonstrating that many of “paradoxes” of behavioral economics actually can be explained by the larger logic of cooperation, propriety, and sympathy outlined by Adam Smith in his two masterworks, The Theory of Moral Senti ...
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Journal articleReview of Austrian Economics · January 1, 2025
This paper explores the philosophical and methodological contributions of Karl Mittermaier, situating his work within the tradition of pragmatic liberalism and connecting it to James Buchanan’s and Frank Knight’s concept of “relatively absolute absolutes” ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · December 1, 2023
Dr. Harold Black has made a career of investigating the effects of different rules and institutional arrangements on the extent to which market participants in finance can exercise a taste for discrimination. This paper considers the nature of Black's cont ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · June 1, 2023
The constitutional political economy (CPE) approach as developed by James Buchanan places emphasis on supermajority rules—in particular, a unanimity requirement for constitutional change. Critics argue that this approach “privileges the status quo” in two ...
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Journal article · January 31, 2023
Though realistically modeling this 'governance cycle' is beyond the scope of traditional formal analysis, this book attacks the problem computationally in two ways. ...
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Journal articleJournal of Private Enterprise · January 1, 2023
This paper addresses the growing literature on the comparative statics of rhetorical equilibrium, using humor as the animating device that corrodes existing norms for understanding the commercial system. Three motivations for economics jokes are advanced: ...
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Journal articleConstitutional Political Economy · December 1, 2022
Traditional antitrust policy was formulated to control pricing and output decisions that were not disciplined by competitive forces, either because of monopoly power or agreements in restraint of trade. Because there is no single criterion for evaluating p ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · December 1, 2022
Distributed energy resource (DER) technologies such as rooftop solar change the structure of production and consumption in the electricity industry. These changes will be mediated by digital platforms in ways that will sharply decrease scale economy entry ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · June 1, 2022
In spatial theory a central concept is salience, or the relative importance of issues in a voter’s mind in evaluating candidates’ platforms. Traditional, self-reported measures of salience have either been national in breadth (“which issues are most import ...
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Journal articleConstitutional Political Economy · March 1, 2022
During the first half of the 19th century, Western Texas was a “trap baited with grass” that attracted migrants hoping to farm. When settlers on the wrong side of an unknown, invisible line could not build successful farms, residents in those counties vote ...
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Journal articleJournal of Contextual Economics Schmollers Jahrbuch · January 1, 2022
Generating verisimilous and policy-relevant models of the macroeconomy in a democracy is a challenge. Three broad theoretical perspectives are considered: (A) the orthodox Keynesian Synthesis; (B) the Austrian response; and (C) the Public Choice response. ...
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Journal articleAmerican Politics Research · November 1, 2021
Using thermometer score data from the ANES, we show that while there may have been no clear-cut Condorcet winner among the 2016 US presidential candidates, there appears to have been a Condorcet loser: Donald Trump. Thus the surprise is that the electorate ...
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Journal articleSocial Science Quarterly · November 1, 2021
Objective: To investigate historical antecedents for the likely effects of Brexit, the “breaking up” of the Commonwealth is considered. In particular, the effects on New Zealand in the period following “Brentry,” or the entry of the UK into the EU, are mea ...
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Journal articleKyklos · August 1, 2020
Preferences and beliefs are more widely and systematically shared than might be predicted by a subjective, idiosyncratic view arising out of neoclassical economics. Two works were published twenty five years ago on just this question, contesting conception ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · June 1, 2020
In 1981, James Buchanan published the text of a lecture entitled “Moral Community, Moral Order, and Moral Anarchy.” The argument in that paper deserves more attention than it has received in the literature, as it closely follows the argument made by Adam S ...
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Journal articleEkonomicheskaya Sotsiologiya · November 1, 2019
According to Michael Munger, there is some evidence of the Third Great Economic Revolution, which can be traced within two dimensions: the sharing economy and the brokerage economy. Although in many industries, these two dimensions are far from each other, ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · October 1, 2019
Gordon Tullock developed an approach to understanding dynamic processes of political change and policy outcomes. The key insight is the notion that political insiders have a comparative advantage—because they face lower transaction costs—in manipulating ru ...
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Journal articleReview of Austrian Economics · June 1, 2018
There are three main foundations of Public Choice theory: methodological individualism, behavioral symmetry, and “politics as exchange.” The first two are represented in nearly all work that identifies as “Public Choice,” but politics as exchange is often ...
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Journal articleSocial Philosophy and Policy · January 1, 2018
This essay develops a notion of “functional corruption,” adapted from sociology, to note that the harm of corruption appears to be contingent. In a system of dysfunctional institutions, corruption can improve the efficiency and speed of allocative mechanis ...
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Journal articleSocial Philosophy and Policy · January 1, 2017
Our theoretical claim is that racism was consciously (though perhaps not intentionally) devised, and later evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by s ...
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Journal articleIndependent Review · December 1, 2016
A third great economic revolution will come about as the sharing economy slashes transaction costs and turns almost every product into an asset with the potential to earn rental income for its owner. Although the demand for manufactured goods will fall, co ...
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Journal articleIndependent Review · June 1, 2016
Michael C. Munger found during conducting economic research that professor Douglass C. North emphasized on the concept of transactions costs as an answer to most of the economic problems, suggesting that transactions costs played a central role in solving ...
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Journal articleConstitutional Political Economy · April 1, 2016
We consider Gordon Tullock’s impact in political science, focusing on his influence as a scholar and as an academic entrepreneur. It is common to think of Tullock as a “natural economist,” but his formal training at Chicago encompassed considerable coursew ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · October 1, 2015
Condorcet polling provides additional information about pairwise rankings often obscured in standard polls when there are three or more candidates. This paper analyzes an original dataset collected from Duke University students in North Carolina concerning ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · July 1, 2015
Government failure is a much bigger problem than its contemporary treatment implies. Setting aside natural disasters, most of the great catastrophes of human history have been government failures of one sort or another. We argue that many so-called market ...
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Journal articleIndependent Review · March 1, 2015
Gordon Tullock, who was born in 1922 in Rockford, Illinois gave the world public choice theory, the concept of rent seeking, and bioeconomics. In early 1943, he enrolled in his first economics class, taught by Henry Calvert Simons. But later in 1943, befor ...
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Journal articleIndependent Review · December 1, 2014
The article reflects on the views and life of James M. Buchanan. The Buchanan family had a political past: Buchanan's grandfather had briefly been governor of Tennessee in the early 1890s as a member of the populist People's Party. This party was a coaliti ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · March 1, 2014
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Different institutions can produce more (or less) preferred outcomes, in terms of citizens' preferences. Consequently, citizen preferences over institutions may "inherit"-to use William Riker's term-the features of preferences over outcomes. But the level ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · January 1, 2014
It is a maxim of Public Choice that voluntary exchanges should not be interfered with by the state. But what makes a voluntary market exchange truly voluntary? We suggest, contra much of the economics literature, that voluntary exchange requires consent un ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · January 1, 2014
During the years immediately following the American Revolution, it was common for Southern elites to express concerns about the morality or long-term viability of slavery. It is unclear, however, whether such expressions of anti-slavery sentiment were genu ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · July 1, 2012
Gordon Tullock made fundamental conceptual contributions to the understanding of collective choices. Tullock balanced an optimism about the capacity of political choices to facilitate gains from exchange with a pessimism about the negative externalities at ...
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Journal articleBasic Income Studies · January 2012
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A distinction is made between libertarian destinations and libertarian directions. Basic income cannot be part of a truly libertarian state unless it could be accomplished entirely through voluntary donations. But basic income is an important step in a lib ...
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Journal articleJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization · October 1, 2011
There has been a division of labor in the "behavioral sciences" This is perhaps most striking in two of the largest behavioral disciplines, economics and psychology. Since 1990, a number of economists have crossed this boundary. But James Buchanan was one ...
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Journal articleCritical Review · September 1, 2011
Self-Interest and Public Interest in Western Politics showed that the public, politicians, and bureaucrats are often public spirited. But this does not invalidate public-choice theory. Public-choice theory is an ideal type, not a claim that self-interest e ...
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Journal articleSocial Philosophy and Policy · June 1, 2011
The arguments for redistribution of wealth, and for prohibiting certain transactions such as price-gouging, both are based in mistaken conceptions of exchange. This paper proposes a neologism, "euvoluntary" exchange, meaning both that the exchange is truly ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · December 1, 2008
Assesses the arguments for the use of market, or political, processes for making collective choices. The border between "what is mine" and "what is ours" is contested, but it is unguarded. Where should it lie? How would we know when it should be adjusted? ...
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Journal articleMathematical and Computer Modelling · November 1, 2008
Many topics might be discussed in the course of any election, but problems that are in fact discussed, and which affect the electorate's choice, are located in the issue space of a relatively small dimension. Two factors contribute to this phenomenon: (a) ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · April 1, 2008
Philosophers tend to think of them as "conventions." Economists and some biologists conceive of them as "spontaneous orders," a concept discussed at some length in other papers in this issue. Perhaps the most general conception is "systems" theory, with ro ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · January 1, 2008
Does the blogosphere generate truth, or what Stephen Colbert calls 'truthiness,' facts or concepts one only wishes or believes were true? Bloggers and the mainstream media face the same difficulties if they wish to rely on the blogosphere as a generator of ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · July 1, 2007
Since the work of Downs (1957), spatial models of elections have been a mainstay of research in political science and public choice. Despite the plethora of theoretical and empirical research involving spatial models, researchers have not considered in gre ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · 2007
Since the work of Downs (1957), spatial models of elections have been a mainstay of research in political science and public choice. Despite the plethora of theoretical and empirical research involving spatial models, researchers have not considered in gre ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · July 1, 2005
Voting procedures nowadays are anachronistic on two counts: the technology of recording and counting votes often is outmoded and too much is expected from the mechanisms of democratic choice. Even if votes always and everywhere were counted perfectly, elec ...
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Journal articleJournal of International Development · March 1, 2004
Aspects of the privatization experience are analysed for a group of 35 low or middle-income developing countries, over the period 1982 through 1999. The theory turns on net political benefits, which in our model are the primary determinant of privatization ...
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Journal articleAmerican Journal of Economics and Sociology · January 1, 2004
The Ostroms have created a paper that goes to the very heart of the public choice enterprise. They suggest that we should conceive of the evolution of constitutional procedures and laws in analogy with biological evolution. One of the paper's central goals ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · October 1, 2003
Preparation for the annual meetings of an organization such as the Public Choice Society involves scheduling various panels (sessions) in the available time slots. No person can be scheduled for more than one panel in the same time slot. Each panel belongs ...
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Journal articleHealth education & behavior : the official publication of the Society for Public Health Education · April 2003
Better understanding of the cognitive framework for decision making among legislators is important for advocacy of health-promoting legislation. In 1994, the authors surveyed state legislators from North Carolina, Texas, and Vermont concerning their belief ...
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Journal articleAmerican Political Science Review · March 2002
An interesting aspect of life at Duke is the annual construction of our local Brigadoon. The well-ordered but ephemeral tent city is named “Krzyzewskiville,” after Duke's head basketball coach. K-ville appears once a year in the weeks before the ga ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · January 1, 2000
It is common to describe the dynamic processes that generate outcomes in U.S. primaries as "unstable" or "unpredictable". In fact, the way we choose candidates may amount to a lottery. This paper uses a simulation approach, assuming 10,000 voters who vote ...
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Journal articlePreventive medicine · March 1998
BackgroundThis study analyzed influences on state legislators' decisions about cigarette tax increase votes using a research strategy based on political science and social-psychological models.MethodsLegislators from three states represen ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · January 1, 1998
Canada is one nation, but it is in many ways two communities, one Francophone and the other Anglophone. We employ a formal model of "ideology" and analyze how nationality is constructed in people's minds. The magnitude of the changes in expressed "preferen ...
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Journal articleTobacco control · January 1997
ObjectiveTo determine state legislators' perceptions about health and tobacco lobbyists, their frequency of contact with these lobbyists, and the amount of campaign contributions from health professional organisations and the tobacco industry. ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · April 1, 1995
The literature on incumbency advantage has focused on margin as an indicator for electoral security. But while electoral margin is a good ex ante measure, it is a poor ex post measure of security. Further, existing work has not integrated the choice of ret ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · January 1, 1995
Experimental work in economics has long focussed attention on strategic interaction amongst individuals. A robust result is that a large fraction of participants in public goods experiments act cooperatively. This paper tests for the extent of strategic be ...
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Journal articleJournal of Theoretical Politics · January 1, 1993
Exploitation has a deservedly bad reputation as an analytic concept in the social sciences. But this need not be so; a simple definition of exploitation is advanced that has a positive basis. Exploitation should be defined as the result of rent-seeking act ...
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Journal articleJournal of Politics · January 1, 1993
Most work on the allocation patterns of campaign contributions by interest groups focuses on the relative productivity of legislators' effort in serving each group. Short time-series and cross-sectional _ studies of PAC activity have been done for the Hous ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · October 1, 1990
Our central goals at the outset of the paper were three: (1) to report on the relative significance of a sophisticated measure of constituent economic interest and a commonly used variable, ADA score, that purports to measure the personal ideology of the c ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · August 1, 1989
The results presented in the previous section tend to confirm the hypothesis that committee assignments shape the pattern of corporate PAC contributions. This note corroborates existing research on corporate PACs at a significantly lower level of aggregati ...
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Journal articleAmerican Political Science Review · January 1, 1989
Students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout. This may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters, but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this expl ...
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