The development of social choice theory over the past three decades has brought many new insights into democratic theory. Surprisingly, the theory of representation has gone almost untouched by social choice theorists. This article redresses this neglect and provides an axiomatic study of one means of implementing proportional representation.The distinguishing feature of proportional representation is its concern for the representativeness of deliberations as well as decisions. We define a representative in a way that is particularly attentive to this feature and then define a method of selecting representatives (a variant of the Borda rule) which selects a maximally representative body. We also prove that this method of selection meets four social choice axioms that are met by a number of other important social choice functions (including pairwise majority decision and the Borda rule).

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Large commercial publishers sell bundled online subscriptions to their entire list of academic journals at prices significantly lower than the sum of their á la carte prices. Bundle prices differ drastically between institutions, but they are not publicly posted. The data that we have collected enable us to compare the bundle prices charged by commercial publishers with those of nonprofit societies and to examine the types of price discrimination practiced by commercial and nonprofit journal publishers. This information is of interest to economists who study monopolist pricing, librarians interested in making efficient use of library budgets, and scholars who are interested in the availability of the work that they publish.monopoly | bargaining | all-or-nothing price | efficiency | information technology

Using unique data from a survey of University of Michigan Law School graduates, we test various models of how sex differences in pay, labor supply and job settings should have evolved as women entered the elite male field of law. We compare the sex gap in earnings 15 years after graduation for two cohorts of lawyers and find that it has remained constant over time. In both cohorts, men earn 52 percent more than women, 17 percent more than women with similar characteristics, and 11 percent more than women with similar characteristics in the same job settings. Sex differences in hours worked have increased over time and explain more of the sex-based earnings gap, while sex differences in job settings and years spent in private practice have declined and explain less of the gap.

From 1965 to 1990, the prevalence of cigarette smoking among US adults (aged > or = 18 years) fell steadily and substantially. Data for the 1990s suggest that the smoking initiation rate is increasing and that the decline in the prevalence of smoking may have stalled, raising the fear that the historical 25-year decline will not continue. The authors used a new dynamic forecasting model to show that although the decline may slow down, the demographics of smoking imply that prevalence will inexorably continue to decline over the next several decades, even without any intensified efforts aimed at tobacco control. The authors estimated and validated the model using historical (1965-1993) data collected by the National Health Interview Surveys on the prevalence of smoking among adults. Their results indicate that the current increase in the smoking initiation rate partially explains the fact that the prevalence of smoking has apparently leveled off, but even if the most grim assumptions about future initiation rates are used, the prevalence of smoking among adults will continue to decline for several more decades. The authors predict that if current initiation and cessation behaviors persist, the prevalence of smoking among adults will automatically decline from its current level of 25% to 15-16% by the second quarter of the next century. Even so, smoking will remain the nation's leading cause of premature death.