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We recommend that an auction market replace the current system for submitting academic papers and show a strict Pareto-improvement in equilibrium. Besides the benefit of speed, this mechanism increases the average quality of articles and journals and rewards editors and referees for their effort. The 'academic dollar' proceeds from papers sold at auction go to authors, editors and referees of cited articles. This nonpecuniary income indicates the academic impact of an article-facilitating decisions on tenure and promotion. This auction market does not require more work of editors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on a paper that analyzes the strategic problem of a political leader in building a reputation of being willing to punish the transgressions of followers even when it may be costly to do so. Description of an effective legislative leader based on the model developed in the paper; Way by which a leader can make his threat to punish credible; Rationalization of the existence of a legislative leader.

The article focuses on the specification of models of campaign finance and comments on papers which address the specific issues related to specification problems within a general model of Congressional voting in the U.S. The appropriate model within which to address the issues concerning the said papers is one which deals with the relationship between the voting behavior of Congressional representatives, the voting behavior of the constituents and the contributions of donors to campaigns.

Comments on Albert Breton and Thomas Courchene's papers on the constitutional change in Canada. Important questions to ask about constitutional arrangements and about their design and redesign; View of Breton on the codification of a Charter of Rights in the 1982 Constitution; Inconsistencies in Courchene's theory.

Comments on the papers by Theodore Keeler and Barry Weingast about the changes in the U.S. regulatory process. Highlights of Keeler's paper; Information on Weingast's paper; Factor that drives the voter and interest groups to support new views through the electoral process.

Comments on a paper that applied some technical analysis from game theory to a dynamic version of the divide-the-dollar game in voting theory. Contribution of the work in principle to the understanding of the role of voting as a paradigmatic political institution; Analysis of whether the approach can yield a testable theory of the outcomes of majority rule; Investigation of how outcomes change over time as an existing government operates in a changing environment.

Comments on a paper about the relevant lessons from the U.S. Federal Convention of 1787 in the context of the role of institutions in political economy and the performance of economies. Reasons for studying institutions; Path of historical change in terms of the way in which institutions evolved through time; Similarity of the sequential pattern of institutional evolution with the way in which the evolution of common law is perceived.

Comments on an article written by Ronald Findlay and Stanislaw Wellisz regarding trade policy. Approach of the authors to voluntary export restraint; Sociological characteristics of the economics profession according to the article; Views of economists on free trade; Explanation on tariff determination.

Presents a list of papers presented at the 1977 annual meetings of the Public Choice Society held at Braniff Place in New Orleans, Louisiana from March 11 to 13, 2005.

Comments on Tom Courchene's informative analysis of the central role played by the Canadian Economic Union issue in the constitutional debates of 1982. Discussion of balkanization; First order of business for any producer seeking rents via the political process; Dominant feature in the Canadian political system.

Comments on the articles of David Austen-Smith and Kenneth A. Shepsle regarding legislative institutions. Problems raised on the interactions between elections and legislatures; Approach used by Austen-Smith on the relationship between electoral and legislative theories; Discussion of the institutional social-choice paradigm; Views on the legislative model of Shepsle.

The article presents views and insights of the author concerning the election law and charter-change processes in the U.S. The author presented his most useful contributions to the problems of modeling constitutional choice processes. He points out that the battles in constitutional conventions are often between the reformers bend on change and the politicians who want to block or shape change to serve their quite different objectives.

Comments on an article about the essential problems in the conceptualization of the U.S. experiment in constitutional choice. Analysis of the efficacy of constitutional forms in restraining the tyrannical exercise of political power; Discussion of the social institutions that renders the issue of constitutional choice less pressing; Problem posed by the concepts of constitutional structure and political condition.

The article comments on the proposed method to evaluate the motives behind government behavior concerning public goods in the U.S. The method is to derive results from a set of simple and largely unobjectionable propositions about public goods. The author points out that it is difficult to argue that efficiency requires uniform public provisions.

Explores the intellectual prostitution of authors. Prostitution of ideas and academic career; Role of journal editors in deciding whether an article is worth publishing or not; Effect of intellectual prostitution to suppliers and consumers.

Discusses the research of Francis Galton on the relationship between voting and robust estimation. Use of the influence curve on determining voting and estimation relationship; Suggestion on the retirement process of juries; Accuracy of the vox populi principle on estimating voter preference.

The article discusses a meeting of the Public Choice Society and Economic Science Association will be held at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, Friday morning, March 9 through Sunday noon, March 11, 2001.

Comments on a paper that analyzed the level, structure and progressivity of a tax system as an interrelated set of political outcomes. Use of a principal-agent model and assumptions about what part of incomes and transactions are observable by taxing authorities at various stages of development; Argument against the influence of urbanization on income distribution.

This commentary demonstrates that Avner Greif, through his citation practices, has denied Janet Landa her full intellectual property rights with respect to her contributions to the economic analysis of trust and identity. He has done so by systematically failing to cite her published papers in this field, incidentally promoting his own publications as meriting priority. In consequence, he has effectively blocked out Janet Landa’s work from the mainstream economics literature, albeit not from the literature of law and economics, where his own writings have not been directed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note reports on the successful use of an integer-programming routine, whose details were delineated earlier, to assign panels to time slots in scheduling the annual meetings of the Public Choice Society in New Orleans in both 2005 and 2006. Each panel, or session, consists of three or four papers and belongs to a specific subject area. All submitted papers are grouped into panels in an initial step. The integer-programming routine then assigns these panels to the available time slots so as to satisfy certain constraints and, in addition, spread the panels in each subject area as evenly as possible across the time slots. Problems that arose, and possible solutions, are briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the 1998 annual meeting the European Public Choice Society at the School of Economics, Goteborg University, Goteborg, Sweden. Aim of the European Public Choice Society; Date for submission of papers; Date of the convention.

Several conclusions may be drawn from the information we have presented here. First and without doubt, the University of Chicago is by far the most dominant force overall, and is particularly so with respect to the production of pages and papers published in the Journal of Law and Economics. The George Mason-Virginia Tech influence is strong with respect to Public Choice, but is not, in our opinion, dominant. One does not necessarily need to be located at a large, research-oriented school in order to publish in either journal, but these schools are the source of most contributions. This is particularly true of the JLE but significantly less so for PC. The source of contributions is very broad, but top 50 institutions account for the lion's share. Contributions by persons employed at foreign institutions are important, particularly for PC. The analysis of papers and pages by degree schools of authors reveals that, while economists dominate, other disciplines are important, especially political science with respect to PC; law and business-related disciplines for JLE. These data also show that, while Chicago faculty contribute only marginally to PC, Chicago graduates exert a very strong influence. The influence of Chicago on the JLE is really notable when we rank institutions by the total contributions of both faculty and graduates, and when we rank the top 25 contributors to each journal. We hope that this paper will provide information useful to those interested, for whatever reason, in institutional and individual publishing performance with respect to the two journals. For us, the process has been difficult and time consuming, but also greatly interesting and rewarding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is possible that a budget breaking incentive scheme may not solve the problem of moral hazard in team production, due to an incentive for a principal to cheat on such an agreement. This is a problem common to incentive schemes which result in an unbalanced budget, which include among them processes designed to reveal demand for public goods. This paper shows the conditions under which cheating is possible, and designs a payment scheme for the principal which is free of any cheating incentive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on an article about the incorporation of partisan activists into the spatial theory of electoral competition. Flaw on the assumption that an individual's utility for a political party depends only on the average of the ideal points of the party's activists.

From its beginnings, public choice has always had a substantial component devoted to federalism and local government decision-making. The DeVoe Moore Center at Florida State University has made the study of local government within a public choice framework a core component of its mission. The Center held a conference February 17-19, 2011, on public choice in a local government setting. This special issue of Public Choice contains the papers presented at that conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an explanation for the lack of profit-maximizing local governments and for the historically widespread use of more or less representative forms of town and city governance. The analytical part of the paper suggests that profit-maximizing governments suffer from a 'proprietor's dilemma,' which can be reduced by including a representative council with veto power over new taxes. Limited but costly mobility plays a role in the analysis, as does the fact that residents often make investments in a town that are difficult to relocate once made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory essay summarizes the contents of the papers presented at a conference in honor of Gebhard Kirchgässner entitled “(Macro-)Economic Policy and Public Choice” which are published in this special issue. In addition to this brief overview on the contributions, this essay relates them to the scientific works of Gebhard Kirchgässner after locating the latter within the realm of Public Choice analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the author presents a brief profile of economist Robert D. Tollison and discuses his career, including his contribution to the study of public choice, industrial organization and the economics of sports and religion.