I investigate when a exible bargaining agenda, where side payments are possible, facilitates cooperation in a context with strategic delegation. On the one hand, allowing side payments may be necessary when one partys participation constraint otherwise would be violated. On the other, with side...

We consider a federation in which citizens determine by federal majority rule a discretionary policy space which partially restricts the sovereignty of member states. Citizens first vote on the size of the discretionary space (the degree of local discretion), and then on its location on the...

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...

This paper presents a theoretical framework to study the effects of geographical factors on the distribution of industries in the world econmy, which consists of many regions. The geographical feature of each region is summarized by a proximity matrix, whose elements measure the closeness...

We examine the consequences of vote buying, assuming this practice were allowed and free of stigma. Two parties competing in a binary election may purchase votes in a sequential bidding game via up-front binding payments and/or campaign promises (platforms) that are contingent upon the outcome...

Using techniques from evolutionary game theory, we analyze potential games with continuous player sets, a class of games which includes a general model of network congestion as a special case. We concisely characterize both the complete set of Nash equilibria and the set of equilibria which are...

In games in which multiple principals contract simultaneously and non-cooperatively with the same agent, standard direct revelation mechanisms in which the agent reports his type(i.e. his exogenous private information) have been proven inadequate to characterize the entire set of equilibrium...

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...

A strategy profile in a repeated game has bounded recall L if play under the profile after two distinct histories that agree in the last L periods is equal. Mailath and Morris (2002, 2006) proved that any strict equilibrium in bounded-recall strategies of a game with full support public...

We consider equilibrium selection in 2x2 bimatrix games with two strict Nash equilibria in a random matching framework. The players seek to maximize the discounted payoffs, but are restricted to make a short run commitment. Modeling the friction this way yields equilibrium dynamics of the...