Public Choice: Models, Methods and Applications

In contrast to private choice, studied by traditional microeconomics, the public choice can be defined as an economic study of non-market decision making. The subject matter of public choice is the theory of collective decision making in committees and an analysis of the committees' behavior and behavior of individuals in committees. The attention of this book is focused on two major issues of the theory of public choice: the theory of voting and the theory of power in committee systems.
Key features include: Economics of private choice and public choice, Public choice and welfare economics, Theory of voting decision making and voting procedures, Problems with majority voting, Aggregation of individual preferences, impossibility theorems, Voting behavior, strategic voting and manipulation, Game-theoretical models of committee systems, Power indices and analysis of voting power in committees, 59 illustrative examples and case studies of various problems of voting decision making and power analysis, Comments and exercises, Extensive references, author index and subject index.