We analyze costly information acquisition and information revelation in groups in a dynamic setting. Even when group members have perfectly aligned interests the group may inefficiently delay decisions. When deadlines are far away, uninformed group members freeride on each others' efforts to...

When an individual performs several tasks simultaneously, resources must be allocated to different brain systems to produce energy for neurons to fire. Following the evidence from neuroscience, we model the brain as an organization in which a coordinator allocates limited resources to the brain...

Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities. We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of...

We propose a formal concept of the power of voice in the context of a simple model where individuals form groups and trade in competitive markets. Individuals use outside options in two different ways. Actual outside options reflect the possibility to exit or to join other existing groups....

In this paper we combine a non-cooperative decision-making game in a federal structure with two levels of interest and an incomplete contract which sets the rules of the game. The question we pose is how to combine ex ante efficiency of the design with ex post efficiency of the outcomes in the...

We compare the behaviour of voters, depending on whether they operate under sequential and simultaneous voting rules, when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many real political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some...

In this study we extend our previous work to examine the dynamic relationship between violence committed by Palestinian factions and that committed by Israel during the Second Intifada. We find a statistically significant relationship between Israeli fatalities claimed by groups associated with...

Conventional wisdom argues that spending levels and, by extension, budget deficits will be higher for governments using bottom-up instead of top-down methods of budgeting. Ferejohn and Krehbiel (1987) appear to debunk this argument. They indicate that the superiority of one method over the other...

The paper analyses the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the EU's Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal...

Should privately informed agents with diverging interests act independently or should they commit to a mechanism? This paper analyzes different communication and decision protocols when communication involves delay. It studies under which conditions agents should (i) choose their actions...