Manfred Holler
Professor, Dr. (rer.pol. habil.)
Contact:
tel. +49 40 428 38 4458 (W)
email: holler (at) econ.uni-hamburg.de
fax: +49 40 428 38 6325
address: Institute of SocioEconomics (IAW), University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, D-20146 Hamburg
personal home page
Research interests:
- public choice
- industrial organization
- game theory
- law & economics
- history of thought
Project in PCRC:
Research Plan 2008-2011
The focus of my research during this period will be on the following interrelated issues:
(1) The relationship of power and responsibility: The project will elaborate combine the set-based concept of freedom of choice with the agent-based concept of power in order to derive a theoretical basis for the discussion of responsibility over social outcomes. It will extend the standard theory of ranking opportunity sets (Pattanaik and Xu, 1990; Klemisch-Ahlert, 1993) and apply the Public Good Index (Holler, 1982, Holler and Packel, 1983) in order to evaluate the rankings from the point of view of the decision makers. In the social context, decision making is interpreted as forming coalitions that exert control over opportunity sets. Membership (i.e. participation) in controlling coalitions is suggested to serve as a proxy of the individual decision maker's responsibility for the social outcome.
The aim of this study is to formalize such concepts like collective responsibility, collective guilt and collective claims. In the latter categories we find claims which contemporary governments issue towards other governments but also public or private institution to return items cultural heritage of "distant periods", e.g., works of art, architecture, crafts, etc.
(2) Measures of poverty: We will re-interpreted the power polynomial such that will indicate the contribution of dimension xi to not being poor. We develop a measure of richness such that the partial differential indicates how the richness of an individual changes if one dimension (e.g., income) increases that characterizes richness (or poverty). The core of the model is to represent the potential ("capability") of an individual by a multilinear extension of a basic characteristic function (Owen, 1972) which describes whether the individual fully satisfies a dimension or not at all.
The aim of this research is to develop a concept which can be applied to measure the effects of a change in the potential (e.g., income) of an individual or a group of individuals on the capacity of this individual or group - and thus have a well-defined instrument for practical social policy as well as for the theoretical analysis of poverty.
REFERENCES:
Holler, M.J. (1982), "Forming coalitions and measuring voting power", Political Studies 30, 262-271.
Holler, M.J. and S. Napel (2004a), "Local Monotonicity of Power: Axiom or Just a Property", Quality and Quantity, 38, 637-647.
Holler, M.J . and S. Napel (2004b), "Monotonicity of Power and Power Measures", Theory and Decision, 56, 93-111.
Holler, M.J. and E.W. Packel (1983), "Power, luck and the right index", Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie (Journal of Economics) 43, 21-29.
Klemisch-Alhert, M. (1993), "Freedom of choice: A comparison of different rankings of opportunity sets", Social Choice and Welfare 10, 189-207.
Pattanaik, P. K. and Y. Xu (1998), "On preferences and freedom", Theory and Decision 44, 173-198.
Owen, Guillermo (1972), "Multilinear extensions of games", Management Science 18, 64-79.