You have the right not to have a hearing: an evaluation of the impact of fully advising civilly committed patients on their rights

There have long been calls for the reduction of coercion in treating civilly committed psychiatric patients. The present study assessed whether a minor procedural change intended to reduce the adversarial nature of the treatment process would have a positive impact. Results suggested that the change in procedure had a positive effect for the most direct outcome variables but results were more mixed for the indirect outcome variables. Nonetheless, overall indications were that the change of procedure affected patient outcome.     

Some limitations of the groves-ledyard optimal mechanism

Public Choice - The tax rule suggested by Groves and Ledyard is certainly an ingenious one, although there is no indication as to how one might fall upon that specific scheme. If offers Pareto...     

POLITICIANS AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF PUBLIC POLICIES

Policy scientists can make important contributions to the study of policy distribution, a question that is likely to be among the most crucial national issues to be discussed throughout this decade. One aspect of this question that has been neglected is the theoretical assumption associated with public choice theory that politicians, once elected, will reward their supporters through the distribution of policy benefits. However, empirical research indicates that policy benefits seldom are distributed in this way. Instead, politicians follow the principle of universalism. In league with bureaucracies and policy communities, politicians define need and then ask bureaucracies to allocate benefits. This makes politicians roles as distributors of policy very different than simplistic models suggest.     

CONSUMER PROTECTION PROGRAMS IN FOOD COOPERATIVES

Food cooperatives have played a vanguard role in consumer protection through (a) information and education, (b) selective merchandising and boycotts, and (c) political lobbying. While education and selective merchandising benefit primarily their own membership, the political efforts have benefited all consumers.     

Strategies for eliciting and merging confidential social research data

This report presents, discusses and extends strategic models for representing the process of merging records from different sources when confidentiality of the records is required by law or custom. Examples and variations on the models cover simple situations, such as eliciting anonymous data from previously identified respondents, as well as more complex merge operations, such as merging files from different data archives and merging data under code linkage systems. The versatility and potential corruptibility of the models are also discussed.Supported by NSF Grants GI29843 and GS320-73X. Professors Eli Rubenstein, Donald T. Campbell, and Lance Hoffman were generous in providing advice on earlier drafts of the paper. However, views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agency or of these individuals.