Nicolaus Tideman

Independence of irrelevant alternatives in the theory of voting

In social choice theory there has been, and for some authors there still is, a confusion between ArrowsIndependence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) and somechoice consistency conditions. In this paper we analyze this confusion. It is often thought that Arrow himself was confused, but we show that this is not so. What happened was that Arrow had in mind a condition we callregularity, which implies IIA, but which he could not state formally in his model because his model was not rich enough to permit certain distinctions that would have been necessary. It is the combination of regularity and IIA that he discusses, and the origin of the confusion lies in the fact that if one uses a model that does not permit a distinction between regularity and IIA, regularity looks like a consistency condition, which it is not. We also show that the famous example that ‘proves’ that Arrow was confused does not prove this at all if it is correctly interpreted.

The Avoidable Excess Burden of Broad-Based U.S. Taxes

The excess burden of taxes can be reduced by shifting taxes from labor and capital onto land and by replacing progressive taxes with proportional taxes. This article uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to develop estimates of the magnitudes of reduction in excess burden that can be achieved in the United States by (1) incrementally shifting revenue from five broad-based taxes to land, (2) replacing the current progressive income tax with a flat tax, and (3) shifting as much taxation as possible to land.

Better Voting Methods Through Technology: The Refinement-Manageability Trade-Off in the Single Transferable Vote

The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is an attractive way of achieving representation that is proportional in terms of whatever characteristics of candidates voters value. Increasingly sophisticated methods of implementing STV have been advanced to overcome identified limitations of earlier methods. But every refinement comes at a cost of increased difficulty of understanding the vote-counting algorithm and increased cost of undertaking the count. This paper uses votes from actual elections to provide evidence about the frequency with which the choice of a particular STV method affects the outcome, and about the type of difference that different methods make. The most sophisticated STV method is CPO-STV, the comparison of pairs of outcomes by STV. This method avoids sequential exclusions and therefore overcomes the limitations of previous methods, that a paucity of votes in the early stages of a count can lead to the exclusion of a candidate who is the consensus choice of voters whose preferred candidates will be excluded at later stages of the count.

Some limitations of the groves-ledyard optimal mechanism

ConclusionThe tax rule suggested by Groves and Ledyard is certainly an ingenious one, although there is no indication as to how one might fall upon that specific scheme. If offers Pareto optimal allocations, and in particular, budget balance,if each individual behaves competitively and faces the equilibrium messages of all other individuals. However, we question the relevance of Nash equilibrium to the Free-Rider Problem. When the Groves-Ledyard Optimal Mechanism is interpreted dynamically, so that it becomes a conceivable solution to the Free-Rider Problem, it has limitations that the demand-revealing process does not always share. On the other hand, the demand-revealing process does not achieve budget balance, so that, in general, neither mechanism dominates the other. Each has its limitations, and an ideal mechanism, by the Hurwicz Impossibility Theorem, is nonexistent.

Secession as a Human Right

If people are to have rights to themselves, then they must have the right to affiliate in sovereign entities composed of people who mutually agree to affiliate with one another. This requires that any individual or group has a right to secede from any sovereign entity. The article develops the idea that a right of secession is natural when rights to territory and other gifts of nature are regarded as belonging equally to all persons, and all persons have rights to themselves. The article also argues that a world that recognizes a right of secession is feasible.

Structurally consistent probabilities of selecting answers

This paper offers a procedure for specifying probabilities for students to select answers on a multiple-choice test that, unlike previous procedures, satisfies all three of the following structural consistency conditions: (1) for any student, the sum over questions of the probabilities that the student will use the correct answers is the students score on the test; (2) for any student, the sum over possible answers of the probabilities of using the answers is 1.0; and (3) for any answer to any question, the sum over students of the probabilities of using that answer is the number of students who used that answer. When applied to an exam, these fully consistent probabilities had the same power to identify cheaters as the probabilities proposed by Wesolowsky, and noticeably better power than the probabilities suggested by Frary et al.

Peace, Justice, and Economic Reform

. Is justice necessary for peace? There can be no justice while people have unresolved grievances, but peace is more than the absence of strife. It is harmony. Justice is the principles of equality and evenhandedness that command and prohibit the use of force in resolving conflicts. Justice is not necessary for peace, but it does facilitate it. Conservative, majoritarian, egalitarian and contractarian efforts to specify justice all fail to respect persons in crucial ways and cannot be expected to lead to peace. The justice that leads to peace is classical liberalism, with its insistence that each person own himself or herself, augmented by the principle of equal rights to the opportunities provided by nature, as advanced by Henry George.

The Justice and the Economics of Rerum novarum on Land

The authors of Rerum novarum attack socialism and Henry George’s claim that the earth is the common heritage of all persons, without distinguishing between these ideas. While acknowledging that “God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race,” they propose that land is simply the transformed wages of those who worked to buy it, ignoring Aquinas’s assertion that “… a rich man does not act unlawfully if he anticipates someone in taking possession of something which at first was common property, and gives others a share: but he sins if he excludes others indiscriminately from using it.” They presume erroneously that the physical inseparability of land and capital makes them economically inseparable. Their position on land should be rejected.

Tullock, Tideman, and the Origins of the Demand-Revealing Process

One of Gordon Tullock’s contributions to economics was his decision in 1971 to publish in Public Choice a dense paper by a doctoral student that made the startling claim that it was possible to motivate people to report their preferences for public goods truthfully. Tullock reported that, while he did not understand the paper when he accepted it, he decided to publish it because if it was right, it was important. Here I report events surrounding the process by which that idea came to be understood by Tullock, by me, and by others.

Property in a Utopian State, Informed by Ideas of Pufendorf and Locke

In considering the nature of a utopian state, one might begin by asking whether such a thing is a contradiction in terms. A state is a repository of power that can overcome disobedience or objection. A utopian place is conceived as a place that manifests ideal conditions. One might plausibly suppose that one component of the ideal conditions of a utopian place would be harmony that made the power of the state unnecessary. How, then, could there be a utopian state?