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We develop a model of adaptive learning with social comparisons. Actors are more likely to choose actions that recently yielded satisfactory payoffs; satisfaction is evaluated relative to an aspiration level that reflects previous payoffs and possibly other players’ payoffs. This captures the phenomenon of social comparison viareference groups. We show that if agents compare themselves to those who are receiving higher payoffs then in stable outcomes all payoffs must be equal. If, however, agents’ aspirations are driven by less ambitious social comparisons then very unequal distributions can be stable. We apply our general results to collective action problems in socio-political hierarchies and derive conditions for stable exploitation. Finally, we develop a computational model, which shows that increases in payoff inequality make outcomes less stable.

This article applies comparative law tools to portray eight significant aspects of the constitutional right to human dignity in Germany and Israel. The elements considered are: the constitutional status of human dignity; the nature of the right; its effect on other constitutional rights; its scope and definition; waiver of human dignity; human dignity after death; negative and positive aspects of the right; and the right to asylum. The textual foundations of the respective constitutional guarantees are as different as human dignity's core meaning. In Germany, such guarantees are held to be absolute, immune to restriction, and therefore quite narrow in scope. In Israel, the scope of the right is much broader, but it is subject to limitations when placed against the public interest. Still, based on the findings of our comprehensive comparison, similar dynamics can be identified in Germany and Israel The constitutional coverage of both absolute and relative principles is broad, as are the constitutional lacunas, which are those dimensions of constitutional law neglected by the written constitution.

canonical assumptions. This approach may be justified on grounds of tractability, but the failure to grasp the significance of different assumptions and push beyond specific models has limited our understanding of the incentives for delegation. Consequently, the justifications for delegation that have received recent scrutiny and testing differ from some of the more plausible justifications offered by informal studies of delegation. We show that surprisingly few results in the literature hinge on risk aversion, and surprisingly many turn on the ignored, though equally canonical, technological assumption that uncertainty is fixed (relative to policies). Relaxing the key assumptions about dimensionality and functional forms provides a clearer intuition about delegation-one that is closer to classical treatments. The theory allows us to relate different institutional features (commitment, specialization costs, monitoring, multiple principals) to delegation's observable properties. lthough the practice of delegation dates back to antiquity-the Book of Exodus refers to itonly in the last century has much scholarship examined its causes and effects, and only recently has research focused on developing and testing formal theories that explore the logic of delegation.1 Despite this recent surge in formal work on delegation, scholars have failed to generalize several important properties of the early pathbreaking models. Instead of revisiting assumptions that were initially imposed for the sake of convenience, recent papers tend to maintain and reinforce the cannonical assumptions, applying these limited models to ever-richer institutional settings. Although the breadth of understanding about delegation across various settings is impressive, this approach has come at a price. It has produced an understanding that only partly captures delegation's informational rationale in even the simplest contexts. The literature is rich in predictions about delegation in complicated institutional settings when stylized foundational assumptions are satisfied but poor in explanations for and intuitions about why a poorly informed boss chooses to delegate to subordinates with different preferences. Moreover, we lack an understanding of what basic features drive the boss's choice of which agent is given control of policy. For example, scholars have provided detailed explanations about how separation of power systems affect delegation by legislatures to agencies, but the basic question "Does the informational rationale for delegation hinge on the boss's risk preferences?" has been ignored. Despite the analysis of complicated signaling and screening games between bosses with ex post controls and their subordinates, we do not yet understand when or why the ally principle (the boss picks the most ideologically similar agent as delegatee) fails in simple settings. We try to put models of delegation on more solid footing by examining a larger (more general) set of environments. We eschew the canonical assumptions of quadratic utility (or even risk aversion), unidimensional outcome spaces, and additive and homogeneous random shocks to policy. Our analysis focuses first on two basic questions: When does delegation occur? and To whom does the boss delegate? We then consider richer, institutionally driven extensions, e.g., the role of commitment and monitoring devices, the impact of multiple bosses, and the institution in which their preferences are aggregated. Through a sequence of nested models with varying levels of abstraction, the analysis isolates the relations between various assumptions and different findings.

The garbage can theory of organizational choice is one of the best-known innovations in modern organization theory. It also has significantly shaped a major branch of the new institutionalism. Yet, the theory has not received the systematic assessment that it both deserves and needs. We evaluate the early verbal theory and argue that it fails to create an adequate foundation for scientific progress. We then analyze and rerun Cohen, March, and Olsen’s computer model and discover that its agents move in lockstep patterns that are strikingly different from the spirit of the theory. Indeed, the simulation and the theory are incompatible. Next, we examine how the authors have built upon these incompatible formulations in developing the theory further. We assess this larger program, which includes the March-Olsen version of the new institutionalism, and find that many of the problems that attended the original article have intensified over time. We conclude that a fundamental overhaul is required if the theory is to realize its early promise.

Is cooperation without central authority stable? If so, how robust is it? Despite what might be the conventional wisdom, The Evolution of Cooperation did not solve this problem deductively. In fact, results obtained later by others seem to have contradicted the book's main message. Reexamining this exceptionally influential work yields a new picture. Part of Axelrod's evolutionary story turns out to be false. But the main intuition, that retaliatory strategies of conditional cooperation are somehow advantaged, proves correct in one specific and significant sense: Under a standard evolutionary dynamic these strategies require the minimal frequency to stabilize. Hence, they support the most robust evolutionary equilibrium: the easiest to reach and retain. Moreover, the less efficient a strategy, the larger is its minimal stabilizing frequency; Hobbesian strategies of pure defection are the least robust. Our main theorems hold for a large class of games that pose diverse cooperation problems: prisoner's dilemma, chicken, stag hunt, and many others.

As arguments about the effectiveness of “muddling through” have proven frustratingly inconclusive, incrementalism—once a major approach to the study of boundedly rational policy processes—has gone dormant. In an attempt to revitalize the debate, I present a formal model of muddling through. The model, by clarifying the logical structure of the informal theory, presents a clearer target for criticism. More importantly, it establishes numerous deductive results. First, some of Lindblom's less controversial conjectures—about the benefits of seriality (repeated attacks on the same policy problem) and redundancy (multiple decision makers working on the same problem)—turn out to be correct if conflict across policy domains is absent or takes certain specified forms. But given other empirically reasonable types of conflict, even these claims are wrong. Second, the advantages of incremental (local) policy search (Lindblom's best-known and most controversial claim) turn out to be still less well founded: in many empirically plausible contexts the claim is invalid.

The ideas in Graham Allison'sEssence of Decision(1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allison's work has received considerable critical attention, there has been surprisingly little examination of the content and internal logic of his models. We subject each of Allison's three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial reformulation.

Schwartz and Tomz (1997) have correctly pointed out an error in our 1987 article: We had neglected to analyze how changes in group composition improve the performance of centralized institutions over time. The change affects only the case of perfect monitoring, however. We argue, moreover, that even in this special context, our main qualitative conclusion—that the centralized structure has no positive advantage over the decentralized one—continues to hold. We reach different conclusions about the relative roles of the two institutions, partly because we had in mind a positive interpretation, whereas Schwartz and Tomz select a normative interpretation of the issue of institutional choice. Finally, we believe that imperfect monitoring is essential to the theory, in order to derive conclusions that are not driven by artifacts of the model or by arbitrary equilibrium selections.

The so-called “paradox of voting” is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens learn by simple trial and error, repeating satisfactory actions and avoiding unsatisfactory ones. (Their aspiration levels, which code current payoffs as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, are also endogenous, themselves adjusting to experience.) Our main result is that agents who adapt in this manner turn out in substantial numbers even in large electorates and even if voting is costly for everyone.Standard conceptions of rational behavior do not explain why anyone bothers to vote in a mass election…. [Turnout is] the paradox that ate rational choice theory.Fiorina (1990, 334)We would like to thank Stephen Ansolabehere, Sorin Antohi, Glenn Ellison, Dedre Gentner, Sunil Kumar, David Laitin, Tze Lai, Arthur Lupia, Elijah Millgram, Lincoln Moses, Scott Page, Tom Palfrey, John Patty, Paul Pfleiderer, Adam Simon, Joel Sobel, Carole Uhlaner, three anonymous referees, and the participants in the Political Economics seminar at the GSB, the Stanford–CalTech workshop, the UNC American Politics Research Group, the UCLA conference on Cognition, Emotion, and Rational Choice, panels at the Annual Meetings of the MPSA and the APSA, the Agent 2000 Workshop, the Seventh Annual Wallis Conference, the CMU–Pitt Colloquium Series, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences seminar series for their helpful comments. This paper was written while Ting was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he thanks UNC's Department of Political Science for its support. It was revised while Bendor was a Fellow at the CASBS, and he is grateful for the Center's financial and intellectual support.

Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action dilemmas—if all playersperfectlymonitor the relation between individual choices and group payoffs. Once monitoring uncertainty is introduced, such strategies degrade rapidly in value, and centrally administered selective incentives become relatively more valuable. Most importantly, we build on a suggestion of Herbert Simon by showing that a hierarchical structure, with reciprocity used in subunits and selective incentives centrally administered, combines the advantages of the decentralized and centralized solutions. This hierarchical form is more stable than the decentralized structure and often secures more cooperation than the centralized structure. Generally, the model shows that the logic of repeated decision making has significant implications for the institutional forms of collective action.

In this article we outline a new framework for the formal analysis of bureaucratic politics. It departs from standard neoclassical approaches, notably those of Niskanen (1971) and Peltzman (1976), in several important respects. First our approach explicitly models a system of three-way interaction among bureaus, politicians, and interest groups. Second, it allows for institutional features of each type of participant. Third, it is a model of dynamic process. Fourth, participants make choices adoptively rather than optimizing. Fifth, participants are only minimally informed.The result is a dynamic model of adaptive behavior, very much in the spirit of Simon's (1947) behavioral tradition, that offers a new perspective on political control, bureaucratic power, and the “intelligence of democracy.”

Empirical studies suggest that mission-oriented bureaucrats bias their design of program alternatives to increase the odds that a superior will choose the kind of program the officials want. However, political executives may anticipate this manipulation and try to reassert control. These struggles are examined in three models. In Model 1 a senior bureaucrat is interested only in missions; the bureaucrat's political superior controls him or her by rejecting inferior proposals and entertaining new options from other policy specialists. Model 2 is a principal-agent analysis. Here the official is interested only in budgets; the official's superior reduces search bias by creating an ex ante incentive scheme. In Model 3 the bureaucrat cares about both budgets and programs; the superior uses both his or her final review authority and ex ante incentives to reduce agenda manipulation. The models' contrasting implications for the political control of bureaucracy are examined.

Most models of agenda control examine dyadic relations—for example, those between a committee and the floor of a legislature. Such relations, however, are always embedded in a larger context, namely, a political environment composed of voters and interest groups. In this paper we model agenda setters (a legislative committee) as decision makers with limited cognitive abilities who adjust over time to their larger political environment. The legislators' policy positions are endogenous, reflecting the relative strengths of voters wielding the district-specific resource of votes and of interest groups wielding the transferable resource of money. The resulting outcomes indicate that neoclassical models of voting and pluralist models of group influence have each told part of the story. When only votes matter, our boundedly rational agents grope toward equilibria close to those of neoclassical models; however, when mobile resources matter as well, the outcomes depart systematically from those of previous models. In particular, interest groups can make themselves worse off by capturing the committee. The results suggest that agenda control is less powerful than conventionally believed and point toward conditions shaping its effectiveness—conditions highlighting the distinctive contributions of pluralist and neoclassical thinking to a broader theory of political institutions.

Literacy is a concept that can be very briefly defined. Webster uses just the five words “ability to read and write,” and few would challenge this as an acceptable dictionary entry. Many scholars, however, have felt compelled to develop much longer definitions, some of paragraph length, as they have examined literacy from a particular perspective, and there is no counting the number of words which have been used, as definition moves on to description and research.

The empirical literature on the control of bureaus notes that politicians have difficulty observing bureaucratic output, but this insight is rarely represented informal models. To analyze how bureaus use this uncertainty strategically, we develop a model of expertise-based agenda control, building on the Niskanen (1971) and Miller and Moe (1983) tradition. We show that under some plausible conditions, bureaus will underestimate the benefits, and overestimate the costs, of their programs. In the model, politicians are neither passive nor omniscient: they anticipate the bureau's strategic behavior and establish a monitoring system to counteract it. This possibility of detection changes the bureau's behavior: even imperfect monitoring reduces the bureau's deception of the legislature, whether or not the legislature's demand for the bureau's services is concealed. Moreover, uncertainty by itself matters: if the legislature makes it harder for a risk-averse bureau chief to predict demand or penalty, the bureau will restrain its deception.

Formal analysis is fairly new in public administration, and there is some scepticism in the field about the intellectual advantages of mathematical methods. This is appropriate. Using these methods is now faddish, and fads can cause goal displacement. A formal model of bureaucracy should be only a tool for deepening our knowledge about public organizations. If the underlying ideas are silly, translating them into mathematics will do little good. If they are promising, however, deductive reasoning can help us explore their potential: if one believesAis a general property of bureaucracies, to fail to work outA's logical implications would be throwing away information. Analysis can also increase the falsifiability of our ideas: ifAimpliesBbut empirically we find not-B, the truth status ofAis brought into question. Or it may turn out, as Arrow discovered about democratic principles, that our informal ideas are logically inconsistent: we thought propertiesCandDdescribe existing or possible institutions, but recasting the ideas into mathematical form reveals that such an institution is impossible. Finally, some problems are just too hard to tackle without formal tools. It is unlikely, for example, that Robert Axelrod would have discovered the robustness of the simple strategy of tit-for-tat in the two person prisoners' dilemma without the help of a computer (to pit tit-for-tat against many opponents in thousands of rounds of play) and of mathematics (to prove some generic properties of tit-for-tat).

The object of this article is to illustrate a particular model of grammatical description by using it to describe the Terena phrase. This model can, for convenience, be given the label “structure-function.” Like any model it employs certain interrelated categories and terms which are mutually defining. Each category can only be understood in reference to the model as a whole.This model sets up grammatical units which are hierarchically arranged. The hierarchy consists of a series of levels of description. At each level there is a grammatical unit and this grammatical unit gives its name to the level concerned. At a given level there is only one grammatical unit. Each such grammatical unit consists of one or more of the units next below it in the hierarchy.