We model a procedural reform aimed at restoring a proper role for the minority in the confirmation process of judicial nominations in the U.S. Senate. We propose that nominations to the same level court be collected in periodic lists and voted upon individually with Storable Votes, allowing each...

Democratic systems are built, with good reason, on majoritarian principles, but their legitimacy requires the protection of strongly held minority preferences. The challenge is to do so while treating every voter equally and preserving aggregate welfare. One possible solution is storable votes:...

This paper studies the political influence of individual firms on Congressional decisions to suspend tariffs on U.S. imports of intermediate goods. We develop a model in which firms influence the government by transmitting information about the value of protection, via costless messages...

A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...

This paper analyses cooperation among national supervisors in the decision to close a multinational bank. The supervisors are asymmetrically informed and exchange information through ’cheap talk’. It is assumed that they consider domestic welfare only. We show that: (1) the supervisors will...

This paper compares centralized and decentralized coordination when managers are privately informed and communicate strategically. We consider a multi-divisional organization in which decisions must be responsive to local conditions but also coordinated with each other. Information about local...

In this Paper we extend the cheap talk model of Crawford and Sobel (1982) to a multidimensional state space and policy space. We provide a characterization of equilibria. We focus on the question of feasibility of information transmission, for large degrees of conflict of interests between the...

We examine strategic information transmission in a controlled laboratory experiment of a cheap talk game with one sender and multiple receivers. We study the change in equilibrium behavior from the addition of another audience as well as from varying the degree of conflict between the sender's...