This paper extends Che and Gale (1998) by allowing the incumbent politician to have a preference for the policy position of one of the lobbyists. The effect of a contribution cap is analyzed where two lobbyists contest for a political prize. The cap always helps the lobbyist whose policy...

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...

This Paper develops a model of political consensus in order to explain the missing link between inequality and political redistribution. Political consensus is an implicit agreement not to vote for extreme policy proposals. We show that such an agreement may play an efficiency-enhancing role....

The decision-making rules of the European Union (EU) are defined in an incomplete contract signed by 15 national governments. The design of the contract defines the set of policy issues where it applies – in decision-making rules i.e. the majority rules and the division of powers among the...

A group of rational individuals with common interest need to select one of two outcomes. The optimal decision depends on whether certain premises or pieces of evidence are established as being true, and each member receives a noisy signal of the truth value of the relevant premises. Should the...

We study the competitive equilibrium of a market for votes where voters can trade votes for a numeraire before making a decision via majority rule. The choice is binary and the number of supporters of either alternative is known. We identify a sufficient condition guaranteeing the existence of...

This paper compares the properties of three electoral systems when voters have imperfect information. Imperfect information blurs voter decisions and may divorce the electoral outcome from the true preferences of the electorate. The challenge for electoral design is therefore to translate the...

This paper examines the impact of policy-makers' horizons on the sustainability of international cooperation. We describe a prisoners' dilemma game between two infinitely-lived organizations (countries) run by agents (policy-makers) with a shorter tenure. The agents' mandates are finite but...

One of the few stylized facts in international relations is that democracies, unlike autocracies, very rarely fight each other. We examine the sustainability of international peace between democracies and autocracies, where the crucial difference between these two political regimes is whether or...

Why do people vote? This question received a lot of attention for more than thirty years, and yet remains unanswered. In this Paper, we take stock of existing empirical regularities and argue that we can use them to improve the model of instrumental voting. Once this is done, we show that purely...