Related Research Articles
Neoclassical economics is an approach to economics in which the production, consumption, and valuation (pricing) of goods and services are observed as driven by the supply and demand model. According to this line of thought, the value of a good or service is determined through a hypothetical maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by firms facing production costs and employing available information and factors of production. This approach has often been justified by appealing to rational choice theory, a theory that has come under considerable question in recent years.
Rational choice theory refers to a set of guidelines that help understand economic and social behaviour. The theory originated in the eighteenth century and can be traced back to political economist and philosopher, Adam Smith. The theory postulates that an individual will perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether an option is right for them. It also suggests that an individual's self-driven rational actions will help better the overall economy. Rational choice theory looks at three concepts: rational actors, self interest and the invisible hand.
Public choice, or public choice theory, is "the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science". Its content includes the study of political behavior. In political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways – using standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. It is the origin and intellectual foundation of contemporary work in political economy.
Rational ignorance is refraining from acquiring knowledge when the supposed cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the expected potential benefit that the knowledge would provide.
The median voter theorem is a proposition relating to ranked preference voting put forward by Duncan Black in 1948. It states that if voters and policies are distributed along a one-dimensional spectrum, with voters ranking alternatives in order of proximity, then any voting method which satisfies the Condorcet criterion will elect the candidate closest to the median voter. In particular, a majority vote between two options will do so.
Anthony Downs was an American economist specializing in public policy and public administration. His research focuses included political choice theory, rent control, affordable housing, and transportation economics. He wrote a number of books including, An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) and Inside Bureaucracy (1967), which have been major influences on the public choice school of political economy. In Downs's Law of Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion (1962), he accurately predicted that expanding expressways could not reduce traffic congestion, since demand would increase as well, and that reducing speeds increases capacity.
Hotelling's law is an observation in economics that in many markets it is rational for producers to make their products as similar as possible. This is also referred to as the principle of minimum differentiation as well as Hotelling's linear city model. The observation was made by Harold Hotelling (1895–1973) in the article "Stability in Competition" in Economic Journal in 1929.
The cobweb model or cobweb theory is an economic model that explains why prices might be subject to periodic fluctuations in certain types of markets. It describes cyclical supply and demand in a market where the amount produced must be chosen before prices are observed. Producers' expectations about prices are assumed to be based on observations of previous prices. Nicholas Kaldor analyzed the model in 1934, coining the term "cobweb theorem", citing previous analyses in German by Henry Schultz and Umberto Ricci.
John E. Roemer is an American economist and political scientist. He is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. Before Yale, he was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis, and before entering academia Roemer worked for several years as a labor organizer. He is married to Natasha Roemer, with whom he has two daughters.
Hobart Peyton Young is an American game theorist and economist known for his contributions to evolutionary game theory and its application to the study of institutional and technological change, as well as the theory of learning in games. He is currently centennial professor at the London School of Economics, James Meade Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Oxford, professorial fellow at Nuffield College Oxford, and research principal at the Office of Financial Research at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
The paradox of voting, also called Downs' paradox, is that for a rational, self-interested voter, the costs of voting will normally exceed the expected benefits. Because the chance of exercising the pivotal vote is minuscule compared to any realistic estimate of the private individual benefits of the different possible outcomes, the expected benefits of voting are less than the costs.
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies is a 2007 book by the economist Bryan Caplan, in which the author challenges the idea that voters are reasonable people whom society can trust to make laws. Rather, Caplan contends that voters are irrational in the political sphere and have systematically biased ideas concerning economics.
New classical macroeconomics, sometimes simply called new classical economics, is a school of thought in macroeconomics that builds its analysis entirely on a neoclassical framework. Specifically, it emphasizes the importance of rigorous foundations based on microeconomics, especially rational expectations.
The Beijing Consensus or China Model, also known as the Chinese Economic Model, is the political and economic policies of the People's Republic of China (PRC) that began to be instituted by Deng Xiaoping after Mao Zedong's death in 1976. The policies are thought to have contributed to China's "economic miracle" and eightfold growth in gross national product over two decades. In 2004, the phrase "Beijing Consensus" was coined by Joshua Cooper Ramo to frame China's economic development model as an alternative—especially for developing countries—to the Washington Consensus of market-friendly policies promoted by the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury. In 2016, Ramo explained that the Beijing Consensus shows not that "every nation will follow China’s development model, but that it legitimizes the notion of particularity as opposed to the universality of a Washington model".
The probabilistic voting theory, also known as the probabilistic voting model, is a voting theory developed by professors Assar Lindbeck and Jörgen Weibull in the article "Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition", published in 1987 in the journal Public Choice, which has gradually replaced the median voter theory, thanks to its ability to find equilibrium within multi-dimensional spaces.
A valence issue is an issue where there is a broad amount of consensus among voters. As valence issues are representative of a goal or quality, voters use valence issues to evaluate a political party’s effectiveness in producing this particular goal or quality.
The Special Law of Curvilinear Disparity or May's Law is a theory conceived in 1973 by political scientist John D. May in his publication Opinion Structure of Political Parties. The theory posits that the rank and file members of a political party tend to be more ideologically extreme than both the leadership of that party and its voters. May contends that politically active people can be classified into three major strata or echelons according to their relative status within a party; party elite, middle-elite, and non-elite. Members of each divergent strata have contrasting motivations for being politically active and calibrate their ideological stances to differing extents as a result.
The altruism theory of voting is a model of voter behavior which states that if citizens in a democracy have "social" preferences for the welfare of others, the extremely low probability of a single vote determining an election will be outweighed by the large cumulative benefits society will receive from the voter's preferred policy being enacted, such that it is rational for an “altruistic” citizen, who receives utility from helping others, to vote. Altruistic voting has been compared to purchasing a lottery ticket, in which the probability of winning is extremely low but the payoff is large enough that the expected benefit outweighs the cost.
Political cognition refers to the study of how individuals come to understand the political world, and how this understanding leads to political behavior. Some of the processes studied under the umbrella of political cognition include attention, interpretation, judgment, and memory. Most of the advancements in the area have been made by scholars in the fields of social psychology, political science, and communication studies.
A jury theorem is a mathematical theorem proving that, under certain assumptions, a decision attained using majority voting in a large group is more likely to be correct than a decision attained by a single expert. It serves as a formal argument for the idea of wisdom of the crowd, for decision of questions of fact by jury trial, and for democracy in general.
References
- ↑ Downs, Anthony (1957). An Economic Theory of Democracy . New York: Harper. ISBN 978-0-06-041750-5.
- ↑ Friedman, Milton (1953). Essays in Positive Economics. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-26403-5.
- ↑ Grofman, Bernard (2004). "Downs and two-party convergence". Annual Review of Political Science. 7 (1): 25–46. doi: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.7.012003.104711 . ISSN 1094-2939.