Brief Descriptions of Uploaded Articles
‘Swaraj’ is a short note on the concept of self-rule that was the rallying idea during the independence struggle; and ‘Panchayati Raj’ on the system which prevailed in India prior to the British rule under which villages were to a great extent self-governing. Corruption in India has certain special features that are particularly wealth-destroying; these and other features are discussed in ‘On the Nature of Corruption in India and Some of Its Implications’.
Law:
‘Why are there so many cases pending in Indian courts?’ attempts to provide an explanation for the pendency of a large number of cases in Indian courts. In ‘On the Significance of Dharampal’s Work for Understanding the Concepts of Rule of Law and Legitimacy in Indian Tradition’, it is argued that, from Dharampal’s meticulous documentation of the civil disobedience movement of the second decade of the nineteenth century against the British, it is possible to draw some very important inferences regarding the Indian tradition relating to legitimacy, as well as the lawless ways of the British. ‘Indo-US Nuclear Agreement’ analyzes the legal and other implications of the Agreement.
Papers titled ‘Efficient Liability Rules: Complete Characterization’, ‘The Structure of Efficient Liability Rules’, ‘Characterization of Efficient Simple Liability Rules with Multiple Tortfeasors’, and ‘Efficiency of Liability Rules with Multiple Victims’ are concerned with the derivation of necessary and sufficient conditions for efficiency of liability rules under different frameworks. In ‘Structure of Incremental Liability Rules’ necessary and sufficient conditions for efficiency are derived for the class of incremental liability rules.
In ‘Efficiency of Liability Rules: A Reconsideration’, it is shown that the notion of negligence as existence of a cost-justified untaken precaution is inconsistent with efficiency. The relationship between the two notions of negligence, namely, negligence as failure to take due care and negligence as existence of a cost-justified untaken precaution are explored in detail in ‘A Note on the Logical Relationship between Two Different Notions of Negligence’. The paper titled ‘Decoupled Liability and Efficiency: An Impossibility Theorem’ establishes that decoupled liability is inconsistent with efficiency.
Although the negligence rule is an efficient rule, it is not immune from strategic manipulation as shown in ‘Negligence Rule: Some Strategic Aspects’. When manipulation takes place, there is no guarantee that the negligence rule will invariably lead to efficient outcomes. A detailed exploration of efficiency of the negligence rule is carried out in ‘On the Efficiency of Negligence Rule’.
‘Decomposition of Accident Loss and Efficiency of Liability Rules’ establishes that a part of accident loss plays no part in providing appropriate incentives to the parties for taking due care and can therefore be apportioned in any manner whatsoever.
‘Economic Analysis of Legal Rules: Some Conceptual Issues’ and ‘Economic Analysis of Tort Law: Some Conceptual and Interpretative Issues’ deal with some methodological issues relating to economic analysis of law, particularly tort law.
If the court uses more than one rule for apportioning liability assignments, inefficiency can arise even when all the rules used by the court are efficient. `Uncertainty Regarding Interpretation of the ‘Negligence Rule’ and Its Implications for the Efficiency of Outcomes’ and ‘Multiple Efficient Rules and Inefficient Outcomes’ are concerned with the conditions under which inefficiency arises.
‘The Coasian Analysis of Externalities: Some Conceptual Difficulties’ is concerned with two distinct issues flowing from Coase’s analysis of externalities and of how courts deal with them. The first issue relates to the domain of validity of the Coase Theorem. It is argued in the paper that if non-pecuniary considerations are brought into the analysis then it can no longer be claimed that the outcome will be efficient regardless of liability assignments. The second issue relates to whether the two ideas of efficient allocation of resources being attained through bargaining in a world of zero transaction costs and individualized efficient court decisions are compatible with each other.
In ‘On the Hind Swaraj Critique of Modernity’, ‘On the Normative Structure of Gandhian Thought – With Special Reference to Hind Swaraj’, ‘On Hind Swaraj Discourse on Institutions and Technology’, and ‘Towards a Framework for Understanding Gandhiji’s Critique of Modernity in Hind Swaraj’ an attempt has been made to understand various strands of Gandhian critique of modern civilization within a unified framework.
In ‘On the Normative Elements of Marxism’, it has been argued that the normative elements of Marxism taken together constitute an incoherent whole.
‘On the Contemporary Relevance and the Future of Democratic Socialism’ argues that democratic socialist ideas, once part of the Indian political mainstream, now almost extinct, remain relevant for contemporary times.
Structure of neutral and monotonic binary social decision rules is analyzed in ‘Characterization of Monotonicity and Neutrality for Binary Paretian Social Decision Rules’ and ‘Structure of Neutral and Monotonic Binary Social Decision Rules with Quasi-Transitive Individual Preferences’. Characterizations of rationality conditions are provided in ‘Characterization of Rationality Conditions in terms of Minimal Decisive Sets’. A characterization for the class of non-minority rules is provided in ‘Characterization of Non-Minority Rules’; and for the class of simple game social decision rules in ‘Structure of Social Decision Rules Which are Simple Games’.
Conditions for quasi-transitivity and transitivity of social preferences are derived for the method of majority decision in ‘A Direct Proof of Inada-Sen-Pattanaik Theorem on Majority Rule’, ‘The Method of Majority Decision and Rationality Conditions’ and ‘The Method of Majority Decision: The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Transitivity and Quasi-Transitivity’; for the class of special majority rules in ‘Special Majority Rules: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Quasi-Transitivity and Transitivity’ and ‘Special Majority Rules: Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Quasi-Transitivity with Quasi-Transitive Individual Preferences’; for the class of non-minority rules in ‘Non-minority Rules: Characterization of Configurations with Rational Social Preferences’, and `Non-Minority Rules: Necessary and sufficient Condition for Quasi-transitivity with Quasi-Transitive Individual Preferences‘; for the class of Pareto-inclusive non-minority rules in ‘Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Quasi-Transitivity and Transitivity of Pareto-Inclusive Non-Minority Rules’; for the class of semi-strict majority rules in ‘Semi-Strict Majority Rules: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Quasi-Transitivity and Transitivity’; for the class of simple game social decision rules in ‘Structure of Social Decision Rules Which are Simple Games’; and for the class of neutral and monotonic binary social decision rules in ‘Maximal Conditions for Transitivity under Neutral and Monotonic Binary Social Decision Rules’.
‘The Coherence of Rights’ provides two characterizations of coherent right-assignments. The results of this paper also demonstrate the incorrectness of the two standard characterizations of coherent right-assignments of the literature.
In ‘Stability and Transitivity’, the connection between non-manipulability of binary social decision rules and transitivity is explored. In ‘The Strong Consistency of Neutral and Monotonic Binary Social Decision Rules’, it is shown that there does not exist any non-trivial neutral and monotonic binary social decision rule that is strongly consistent.
‘Conformism, Non-conformism and Voting Equilibria’ is concerned with investigating the consequences for voting equilibria when some individuals do not possess intrinsic preferences and instead endeavour to relate their preferences to social preferences by conforming or non-conforming.
Abstracts containing greater details of the contents of papers are given for most of the papers.