The relationship between the normalized gradient addition mechanism and quadratic voting

Quadratic voting and the normalized gradient addition mechanism are both social choice mechanisms that confront individuals with quadratic budget constraints, but they are applicable in different contexts. Adapting one or both to apply to the same context, this paper explores the relationship between these two mechanisms in three contexts: marginal adjustments of continuous policies, simultaneous voting on many public choices, and voting on a single public choice accompanied by private monetary consequences. In the process, we provide some formal analysis of quadratic voting when (instead of money) votes are paid for with abstract tokens that are equally distributed by the mechanism designer.     

Why Public Employees Rebel: Guerrilla Government in the Public Sector

Employee recalcitrance and employer reprisal are ever-present conditions in public service. Yet we have limited knowledge of the forces that move administrators away from acquiescence and toward antagonism. The authors follow the theoretical thrust of behavioral public administration to better understand administrative behavior by targeting the determinants of guerrilla government actions. They do so by presenting the results of a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey of federal bureaucrats. Findings show that decisions to pursue guerrilla activities are conditional on a multitude of factors—namely, the bureaucrat's personal views of the directive as a policy solution, the compatibility of the directive with the bureaucrat's ethical framework, the status of the person issuing the directive, and the probability that the directive might cause harm to others. Notably, these decisions generally are not affected by the probability of retribution or the expected type thereof. However, they are affected by the magnitude of harm that may ensue if orders are obeyed and not resisted.     

The Silence of the Lambdas: Deterring Incapacitation Research

This essay provides an economist’s perspective on criminological research into incapacitation effects on crime. Our central argument is that criminologists would do well to substantially scale back the enterprise of trying to estimate the various behavioral parameters central to a micro-level approach to measuring incapacitation effects, including the annual rate of offending outside of prison (λ) and the lengths of criminal careers. One problem with this line of research is practical: for example, mean estimates of self-reported criminal activity by incarcerated prisoners are quite sensitive to reports by the most criminally active offenders. But the larger concern is conceptual—the incapacitation effects from a given change in sentencing policy may be undermined by the possibility of replacement effects, and at the same time omit other benefits that may arise from deterrent effects on crime. A more promising approach is to identify plausibly exogenous changes in sentencing policy in order to estimate the net impact on crime from the combined effects of incapacitation, deterrence and replacement.

Individual differences in young offender emotional behaviour

Purpose. Recent research into adolescent emotional behaviour has confirmed a three‐factor structure for emotional style in samples of children and adolescents, ranging in age from nine to nineteen years ( Clarbour & Roger, 2004 ). This study was aimed at replicating the factor structure for the Emotional Behaviour Scale (EBS) amongst young offenders, and investigating the role of the factors in offender behaviour. Method. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to compare the responses of 307 male young offenders to those of 294 schoolchildren. A subsample of 264 offenders additionally completed indices of offending behaviour that were used for further validation of the EBS amongst young offenders. Results and conclusions. The three emotional style factors obtained for schoolchildren – social anxiety, malevolent aggression and social self‐esteem – were confirmed in the young offender sample. Lower scores on malevolent aggression, and higher scores on social anxiety and social self‐esteem, were significantly associated with later first police contact. High malevolent aggression and lower social anxiety were also significantly associated with placement on Governor's report, and high malevolent aggression was associated with violent offence types. The three scales were also found to relate systematically and predictably to a range of other personality and emotional style scales.