Large Coalition Research Articles

Intertemporal objective functions: Strong pareto versus anonymity

This paper continues work begun by Koopmans: how to order infinite utility, consumption, or payoff streams; and, in particular, how to provide an axiomatic basis for ordering them. Diamond's anonymity axiom is compatible with dictatorship and is therefore too weak. We motivate a form of anonymity that gives an equal weight to equally large coalitions, and investigate its implications. Medial limits are shown to satisfy this version of anonymity. A joint characterization reduces the choice between discounting rules and medial limits to the choice between anonymity and the strong Pareto principle. By means of an example we show that discounting optima may differ from anonymous optima in an essential way.

Reply: Predictions of Hospital Mortality Rates

Letters1 November 1997Reply: Predictions of Hospital Mortality RatesMichael Pine, MD, MBA, Marija Norusis, PhD, MPH, and Barbara Jones, MAMichael Pine, MD, MBAUniversity of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637Search for more papers by this author, Marija Norusis, PhD, MPHUniversity of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637Search for more papers by this author, and Barbara Jones, MAUniversity of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637Search for more papers by this authorAuthor, Article, and Disclosure Informationhttps://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-127-9-199711010-00018 SectionsAboutFull TextPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail IN RESPONSE:We agree with Drs. Kutner and Rao that validation of a model done by using bootstrapping or split-sample methods is essential for obtaining an unbiased estimate of its goodness of fit. Because our database was large, and because the primary focus of our paper was the comparison of models of several different types, we did not include validation results in our paper. While evaluating hospital performance for large coalitions, we have found that c-statistics remain remarkably stable when models developed on 1 year of data are applied to a subsequent year. The data on acute myocardial infarction presented ... Author, Article, and Disclosure InformationAffiliations: University of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637 PreviousarticleNextarticle Advertisement FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Metrics 1 November 1997Volume 127, Issue 9Page: 847KeywordsAcute myocardial infarctionAcute renal failureDatabasesDeath ratesMyocardial infarctionResearch laboratoriesShock Issue Published: 1 November 1997 Copyright & PermissionsCopyright © 1997 by American College of Physicians. All Rights Reserved.PDF downloadLoading ...

The campaign to raise the tobacco tax in Massachusetts.

Question 1 raised the Massachusetts state tobacco tax to fund tobacco education programs. This paper examines the process of qualifying and passing Question 1. Information was gathered from internal memoranda, meeting minutes, newspaper articles, internal documents, letters, newsletters, news and press releases, and personal interviews. Data about campaign contributions were obtained from the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance. Three factors help explain why Question 1 passed: (1) the policy environment was favorable because of the social unacceptability of smoking; (2) the activists assembled a large coalition of supporters; and (3) the activists countered industry claims that the new tax would hurt small business and lower-income smokers and would be wasted by the legislature. The ballot initiative passed despite the industry's $7 million campaign to defeat it. The apparent influence of the tobacco industry on the legislature was the driving force behind the decision of public health activists to qualify Question 1. Moving policy-making out of the legislature into the public arena widened the scope of conflict and enabled public health activists to win.

Manipulations by Coalitions Under Asymmetric Information: The Case of Groves Mechanisms

We study the formation in coalitions in Vickrey–Clarke–Groves mechanisms, in a model where we assume that asymmetry of information exists within coalitions. The coalitions must therefore use an internal mechanism to give incentives to their members to reveal their information to each other. We show that there exists no mechanism robust to all coalitions. On the other hand, there exist mechanisms robust to coalitions of two agents, and any larger coalition that would form in these mechanisms would be subject to manipulation by subcoalitions. We characterize these mechanisms and show in particular that they are never anonymous.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C71, D82.

Consumers and health policy development: confessions of a guarded optimist.

Using the example of a large coalition of senior citizens in Ontario, Canada, the potential of consumer input to contribute to policy development and some key barriers to fulfilling that potential are explored. The political appeal of consumer involvement in policy development is highlighted, as is the potential for opposition from providers. The critical issue of finding sustainable funding to support consumer activities is also identified, along with the worrying trend of diminishing government support for such involvement in Canada.

Broad Coalition Of Nonprofits Fights House Limits On Political Advocacy

Early last month, the House approved a rider to the fiscal 1996 appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health & Human Services (HHS), Education, and related agencies, which says that nonprofit groups that receive federal grants cannot spend more than 5% of their own money for lobbying. At that time, universities were not very active in the large coalition of groups that had mobilized to oppose the rider. Since then, university groups such as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Council on Education have begun to aggressively oppose the bill. They have joined forces with about 450 other organizations under an umbrella coalition called Independent Sector. University involvement in combating the legislation is growing because everybody is seeing that it's going to affect members of their institutions, says Marsha N. Adler, director of government relations at AAUP. AAUP has established a computer bulletin board and has ...

Acyclicity and the dispersion of the veto power

Blair and Pollak (Econometrica (1982) 50: 931–943) prove that, if there are more alternatives than individuals, then, for every arrovian binary decision rule that is acyclic, there is at least one individual who has a veto power over a critical number of pairs of alternatives. If the number of individuals is larger than the number of alternatives, there need not be single vetoers but there could be small coalitions endowed with a similar power. Kelsey (Soc Choice Welfare (1985) 2: 131–137) states precise results in this respect. In this paper, we first give a new and much simpler proof of the main result of Blair and Pollak and complete proofs of the generalization of this result by Kelsey. Then we give a precise answer as to the minimum size of the coalitions that must have a veto power under any acyclic binary decision rule and the minimum number of pairs of alternatives on which these coalitions may exercise their power. We also show that, if the veto power of the coalitions of the minimal size attainable under the last objective is limited to the minimum number of pairs of alternatives, then all larger coalitions have a veto power on all pairs. All the results are obtained by appealing to an acyclicity condition found by Ferejohn and Fishburn (J Econ Theory (1979) 21: 28–45). In the case of symmetric and monotonic binary decision rules, proofs are even easier and illustrate clearly the reasons for the veto power.

On Being Very Smart: The Mental Health Community's Response in the Health Care Reform Debate

President Clinton's proposal for a health care system based on managed competition began a dialogue within the mental health community about whether such a system would work in the mental health area. In early March a large coalition representing more than 30 mental health organizations, including advocacy organizations, state systems, professional associations, provider agencies, families, and consumers, formally transmitted to the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform a document presenting a unified position on how mental health care should be delivered within a reformed health care system. The consensus document, reproduced here, maintains that a full range of services must be available to all children and adults with mental or emotional disorders. The document presents guidelines for containing costs, for standards of delivery for mental health services, and for the role of the states and the federal government within the new health care system.

The influence of large coalitions

This paper contains two results on influence in collective decision games. The first part deals with general perfect information coin-flipping games as defined in [3].Baton passing (see [8]), ann-player game from this class is shown to have the following property: IfS is a coalition of size at most\(\frac{n}{{3\log n}}\), then the influence ofS on the game is only\(O\left( {\frac{{\left| S \right|}}{n}} \right)\). This complements a result from [3] that for everyk there is a coalition of sizek with influence Ω(k/n). Thus the best possible bounds on influences of coalitions of size up to this threshold are known, and there need not be coalitions up to this size whose influence asymptotically exceeds their fraction of the population. This result may be expected to play a role in resolving the most outstanding problem in this area: Does everyn-player perfect information coin flipping game have a coalition ofo(n) players with influence 1−o(1)? (Recently Alon and Naor [1] gave a negative answer to this question.) In a recent paper Kahn, Kalai and Linial [7] showed that for everyn-variable boolean function of expectation bounded away from zero and one, there is a set of\(\frac{{n\omega (n)}}{{\log n}}\) variables whose influence is 1−o(1), wherew(n) is any function tending to infinity withn. They raised the analogous question where 1−o(1) is replaced by any positive constant and speculated that a constant influence may be always achievable by significantly smaller sets of variables. This problem is almost completely solved in the second part of this article where we establish the existence of boolean functions where only sets of at least\(\Omega \left( {\frac{n}{{\log ^2 n}}} \right)\) variables can have influence bounded away from zero.

Determinants of protectionist attitudes in the united states house of representatives

Constituency pressures are often credited with explaining the votes of individual members of Congress on trade legislation. Such pressures could even lead to the formation of a protectionist coalition among members of Congress as a result of vote trading among the members seeking to represent constituency interests. An analysis of seven votes in the House of Representatives in 1983 and 1984, however, provides little evidence that such constituency pressures were effective and virtually no evidence that any large protectionist coalition was forming at this time. The party affiliation of the members, however, was important to their voting patterns.

A Noncooperative Theory of Legislative Coalitions

This noncooperative theory is based on a model that incorporates an institutional structure that reflects the sequential process of agenda formation and voting in a legislature that has the task of allocating particularistic benefits among legislative districts. The theory is intended to identify the incentives for the formation of proposal-coordinating coalitions as a function of characteristics of the political system and the rules that govern agenda formation. Coalition proposals allocate all the benefits to their districts, and whenever the coalition has discipline or controls the chair, it will be of minimal winning size when proposals are governed by a closed rule. When coalition discipline is absent and the chair is neutral, the coalition will be comprised of approximately 70% of the legislature. A legislative rule that allows amendments may result in larger coalitions. Coalition composition is also considered.

Interest Groups and the Changing Environment of State Educational Policymaking: Developments in Pennsylvania

To explore the consequences for education interest groups of Reagan's "New Federalism, "the "excellence"movement prompted by A Nation At Risk, and the increased role of governors and legislators in educational policy, 33 key policy participants in Pennsylvania were interviewed. They were asked about changes since 1980 in lobbying activities and tactics, in points of access to policymaking, and about which groups now seemed most influential. The study revealed major changes in the state educational policy environment. When a strong governor seized the initiative and placed the education interest groups in a reactive position, they responded by reducing their infighting and formed a large coalition to present a unified position on school funding.

Male lions in large coalitions gain reproductive advantages

Cooperation between two or more individuals has been shown to yield short-term benefits in several vertebrate species1–4, and various hypotheses have been developed to explain the evolution of cooperative behaviour5–7. However, until now there has been no evidence to show that such cooperation actually does confer lifetime's reproductive advantages on more than one member of the coalitions concerned8,9. Long-term studies of wild lions (Panthera leo L.) have now provided such evidence. We show that, compared with singletons and pairs, male lions in groups of three or more can more reliably gain tenure of female prides, retain tenure for longer, mate with more different females, and produce more surviving offspring; thus each individual has higher fitness through cooperation.

A Class of Convex Nuclei Solution Concepts from Differences in Coalition Excesses

In this paper a class of solution concepts for n) player games is introduced which depend upon a weighted difference between large and small coalition excesses.A characterization of these solution concepts is given in terms of a convex hull of a set of points and a linear programming formulation is presented. A sequential solution concept which gives a unique outcome for each set of weights is derived from these solution concepts. Sothe applications for regulatory problems are indicated.

A Remark on the Core of an Atomless Economy

In an atomless economy any allocation that is not blocked by coalitions is in the core. Hence, in such an economy, a competitive equilibrium is characterized by the blocking power of part of the coalitions which excludes all big coalitions. THE CORE of an economy consists of all the allocations that are not blocked by any coalition. In this note we prove that for any positive number 8, the core of an atomless economy coincides with the set of allocations that are not blocked by any coalition of measure less than s. This result implies that even if the large coalitions cannot be formed, any unblocked allocation is still in equilibrium with respect to some price system. In particular, the formation of the coalition of all traders or any large coalition is not needed to insure the Pareto-optimality of final allocation. We prove here directly that the core is equal to the set of allocations that are not blocked by small coalitions. The same result can also be obtained by proving that Aumann's [1], Vind's [5], or Hildenbrand's [2] equivalence theorems hold with the additional restriction on the measure of the blocking coalitions. In any case the proof is a simple application of Liapunov's convexity theorem [3 and 4] (for the statement of the theorem see also [2, Appendix, p. 451]).

Political Parties in Thailand

p OLITICAL PARTIES have been relatively recent innovation in government of any national society. These unique mass organizations developed first in Western nations as popular suffrage gradually expanded and larger numbers of elected offices were created.' The founding of parties in some non-Western began during final stages of Western colonial rule, yet role of these Western-style structures since achievement of national independence has often been erratic, symbolic, or abortive. They have been subject of intensive studies by scientists and their functions and roles in have been defined and classified according to various criteria as well as their organization, leadership, membership, degree of competition, and ideology. Duverger, for example, defined party as a community with particular structure. Neumann considered party as the great intermediary which links social forces and ideologies to official governmental institutions and relates them to action within larger community.3 More recently, Almond and Powell have categorized party as the specialized structure of modern societies which emerges where number and variety of interests being articulated becomes too great to receive satisfaction through informal interaction.4 The broad pattern of behavior caused by interactions of party activities has been called political party system which has been frequently classified according to number and/or functions of parties, i.e. one-party, dominant-party, two-party, multi-party, etc. This specialized structure in Western industrialized has tended to perform function of interest aggregation by amalgamating large coalitions among diverse organized and semi-organized groups seeking control of formal governmental offices.5 It has also engaged in recruitment by selecting candidates for specific offices and in socialization by shaping popular values and attitudes on current economic