To avoid unfavorable inferences about her ability, an expert might cling to her original opinion and ignore valuable new information in formulating subsequent opinions. Conceivably, the expert might decline an initial opportunity to offer an opinion, delaying the opinion formation until more accurate information has arrived. However, we show that reputational concerns often lead an expert to express an opinion at the first opportunity, thereby making a snap decision.
Signature requirements serve as barriers to prevent citizens from overusing initiatives. This study investigates the properties of optimal signature requirements by proposing a model in which the initiative process is a game played among citizens, a campaigner, and a legislature. Under the optimal requirement, the campaigner succeeds in collecting the required signatures only when it creates welfare that exceeds the cost of holding a referendum for the final decision. I specify the condition that such an optimal requirement is achievable. In addition, I perform comparative statics analyses to investigate the validity of the differences in signature requirements among countries and petition types. The results reveal a high optimal requirement when citizens have low variance regarding their opinions or do not consider the campaigned issue important. Finally, I evaluate the suggested reforms in the real world, such as imposing an additional cost on the campaigner to initiate a petition and a ban on paid petitioners, and show that while the former reduces citizen welfare, the latter improves it.
When optimal policies for governments are studied in economics, social welfare functions are often used, but the functions are typically unobservable. This paper estimates the social welfare function of Japan's central government from FY 1955 to 2010. We assume that the central government determines its subsidies to the local governments of prefectures to maximize a social welfare function, which is assumed to be a weighted sum of the utility of a representative resident of each prefecture. The weight on each prefecture is estimated from the amounts of subsidies using the method developed by Iritani and Tamaoka (2005). Using regression analysis, we show that the weight on a prefecture is approximately equal to the prefecture's population. The correlation coefficient between weights and populations is 0.969. This implies that the social welfare function is approximately the (unweighted) sum of the utilities of all individuals in the entire country, that is, utilitarian with identical weights on all individuals.
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