Two players need to agree to adopt a certain option, otherwise the status quo is maintained. The correct choice depends of an unknown state variable. While both players would like the correct choice to be made, their relative concern with the two types of mistakes may differ and is private...

This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient...

Since campaign finance reform is usually motivated by the concern that existing legislation can not effectively prevent campaign contributions to ‘buy favors’, this paper assumes that contributions influence political decisions. But, given that it is also widely recognized that interest...

In models of non-deterministic contest, players exert irreversible effort in order to increase their probability of winning a prize. The most prominent functional form of the win probability in the literature is the so-called “logit” contest success function. We provide a simple...

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide verifiable policy-relevant information to a political decision-maker and to exert political pressure on her. We show that both lobbying instruments are interdependent. In our view information provision is a risky attempt to affect the...

Elements of an economic theory of political institutions are introduced. A variety of electoral systems are reviewed. Cox's threshold is shown to measure incentives for diversity and specialization of candidates' positions, when the number of serious candidates is given. Duverger's law and its...

We study dynamic committee bargaining over an infinite horizon with discounting. In each period a committee proposal is generated by a random recognition rule, the committee chooses between the proposal and a status quo by majority rule, and the voting outcome in period t becomes the status quo...