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Jon Elster's "Securities Against Misrule: Juries, Assemblies and Elections": a Review Essay, Journal of Economic Literature

Abstract

The standard economic approach to designing institutions for collective decision making recognizes individuals' strategically rational motivations for misrepresentation and asks how best, given an objective function, to design a set of incentives and constraints to internalize or negate such motivations. Securities Against Misrule offers, in the author's phrase, an "essay in persuasion" to the effect that such an approach is fundamentally misguided. Instead, Elster argues for a behavioral approach centered on designing institutions for good decision-making, rather than good outcomes, by individuals whose actions are chronically subject to emotional, self-interested and prejudicial distortions.

Type

Article

Author(s)

David Austen-Smith

Date Published

2015

Citations

Austen-Smith, David. 2015. Jon Elster's "Securities Against Misrule: Juries, Assemblies and Elections": a Review Essay. Journal of Economic Literature.: 65-78.

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