T. Nicolaus Tideman

A New and Superior Process for Making Social Choices

This paper describes and elaborates a process first discovered by Edward H. Clarke that motivates individuals to reveal their true preferences for public goods. The essence of the process is that each individual is offered a chance to change the outcome that would occur without his vote by paying a special charge equal to the net cost to others that results from including his vote in the decision. Because the special charge on any one person is not paid to any other person, a very small budget surplus results. Applications to both discrete and continuous decisions are illustrated.

DOES THE RIGHT TO CARRY CONCEALED HANDGUNS DETER COUNTABLE CRIMES? ONLY A COUNT ANALYSIS CAN SAY*

An analysis of the effects of right‐to‐carry laws on crime requires particular distributional and structural considerations. First, because of the count nature of crime data and the low number of expected instances per observation in the most appropriate data, least‐squares methods yield unreliable estimates. Second, use of a single dummy variable as a measure of the nationwide effect of right‐to‐carry laws is likely to introduce geographical and intertemporal aggregation biases into the analysis. In this paper, we use a generalized Poisson process to examine the geographical and dynamic effects of right‐to‐carry laws on reported homicides, rapes, and robberies. We find that the effects of such laws vary across crime categories, U.S. states, and time and that such laws appear to have statistically significant deterrent effects on the numbers of reported murders, rapes, and robberies.

Indices of Cheating on Multiple-Choice Tests

This paper reports the development of indices reflecting the probability that the observed correspondence between the multiple-choice test responses of two examinees was due to chance. Applications of the indices are presented both with respect to apprehending persons who cheat by copying answers and with respect to monitoring the prevalence of this form of cheating in order to evaluate methods of preventing it.

An experiment in the demand-revealing process

ConclusionsThe principal findings of this experiment are: It is somewhat time-consuming but not otherwise difficult to employ the demand-revealing process in groups of 10 to 60. The ability of the demand-revealing process to take account of intensities of preferences is appreciated by many of the persons who have used the process, but the departure from one-man-one-vote is strongly resisted by others. The outcomes reached by demand-revealing differed from majority rule in about one-tenth of the cases. The improvement in efficiency associated with these reversals of majority rule was 2.25 percent of the net benefit of making the efficient decisions. The Clarke taxes, which would decline in percentage terms as group size increased, were 3.04 percent of the net value of efficient decisions for the decisions studied.

Accurate Valuation in the Absence of Markets

Incomplete markets do not provide accurate information about peoples subjective valuations of goods. Knowledge of these subjective valuations is often important, however, for example when compensation payments for damaged or destroyed property are required. We argue that in such cases, an attractive measure of the value of a good is the reservation price of the owner, who is generally the person who values it most highly. If a property is sufficiently unique so that there is no market price that can be used as an approximation, then the only way to learn this subjective reservation price is to have the owner self-assess his property. We describe a mechanism that provides an incentive for the owner to self-assess his property honestly without requiring that the propertys value be objectively observable.

Statistical evaluation of voting rules

We generate synthetic elections using two sources of survey data, two spatial models, and two standard models from the voting literature, IAC and IC. For each election that we generate, we test whether each of 54 voting rules is (1) non-manipulable, and (2) efficient in the sense of maximizing summed utilities. We find that Hare and Condorcet–Hare are the most strategy-resistant non-dictatorial rules. Most rules have very similar efficiency scores, apart from a few poor performers such as random dictator, plurality and anti-plurality. Our results are highly robust across data-generating processes. In addition to presenting our numerical results, we explore analytically the effects of adding a Condorcet provision to a base rule and show that, for all but a few base rules, this modification cannot introduce a possibility of manipulation where none existed before. Our analysis provides support for the Condorcet–Hare rule, which has not been prominent in the literature.

Developing the aggregate empirical side of computational social choice

The aggregate empirical side of computational social choice has received relatively little attention. This paper provides a progress report on our on-going research project on statistical characterizations of the outcomes of vote-casting processes. We describe a statistical model that is capable of generating voting situations for three-candidate elections that have a distribution very similar to that of observed voting situations. We show that our simulated voting situations can provide interesting insights into the question of which voting rule is most likely to identify the best candidate.

Frank Knight's Proposal to End Distinctions among Factors of Production and His Objection to the Single Tax

Few topics in the area of public finance have been debated as hotly as the economic and social effects of taxes on land value. Until the late nineteenth century, most economists considered taxes on land value to be desirable. But in the aftermath of Henry George’s proposal of a “single tax,” well-known economists like John B. Clark, Herbert J. Davenport, Richard T. Ely, Frank H. Knight, and Edwin R. A. Seligman offered a multitude of reasons why it would not be desirable to concentrate taxes on land. Their arguments effectively removed the idea of concentrating taxes on land value from the agenda of economics. Today, only a few economists are aware of the debate, and even fewer consider taxes on land value to be an attractive alternative to taxes on labor and capital. This development is somewhat surprising, because there is a consensus in the local public finance literature that taxes on land value are nondistortive.1 Land value taxation could therefore be a desirable policy for municipalities that wish to increase economic activity within their

A Generalized χ2 for the Significance of Differences in Repeated, Related Measures Applied To Different Samples

When repeated measures are not independent, sample data can be used to estimate the average covariance among the measures, and this can be used to calculate an appropriate estimate of the variance in a sum of measures. When such an estimate of the variance is employed, a χ2 statistic can be used to test the significance of differences in repeated, related measures applied to different samples.

Marginal Cost Pricing and Eminent Domain

There are three separate strands of literature in economics that are related to the efficiency of takings under eminent domain: one addresses the question of optimal compensation for properties that are taken, a second inquires how governments might learn the values of properties that they consider taking, while a third analyzes solutions to the problem of land assembly. This essay reviews these strands of literature and argues that the principle of marginal cost pricing can be used as a unifying principle for integrating them.