This paper models individual choices of social groups and the formation of group identity, and examines the conditions with which the group identity reinforces the productivity of individuals. A social group is defined as a network that provides with a market for interactions to its members....

In an abstract model of division problems, we study division rules that are not manipulable through a reallocation of individual characteristic vectors within a coalition (e.g. reallocation of claims in bankruptcy problems). A coalition can be formed if members of the coalition are connected on...

This paper is motivated by a practical income (or wealth) taxation problem: For a public good economy where the provision of public goods is to be financed by income taxes collected from individuals, what is the optimal feasible tax mechanism when a social planner is relatively uninformed of the...

This paper formulates a model of dynamic, endogenous reform of political institutions. Specifically, a class of dynamic political games (DPGs) is introduced in which institutional choice is both recursive and instrumental. It is recursive because future political institutions are decided under...

We model electoral competition between two parties in a winner take all election. Parties choose strategically first their platforms and then their campain spending under aggregate uncertainty about voters' preferences. In the unique Nash equilibrium larger elections are characterized by a...

Spatial models of voting behaviour are the dominant paradigm in political science. Consistent with this approach, it will be the case that, ceteris paribus, voters should vote for the party nearest to them on the political spectrum. A key question is how we measure nearness or distance. We...

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide a political decision-maker with policy-relevant information and to exert pressure on her. Both activities are costly but may induce the lobby's preferred policy. Our paper provides an integrated analysis of both lobbying activities and...

The phenomenon of "choice shifts" in group decision-making is fairly ubiquitous in the social psychology literature. Faced with a choice between a ``safe" and ``risky" decision, group members appear to move to one extreme or the other, relative to the choices each member might have made on her...

Abstract: In a society where individuals differ in their valuation of different social policies, when might one consider a given individual as having references that are extreme relative to the others? And how important are such preferences in determining eventual policy? In this paper, we...

Why would a political elite voluntarily dilute its political power by extending the voting franchise? This paper develops a dynamic recursive framework for studying voter enfranchisement. We specify a class of dynamic games in which political rights evolve over time. Each period, private...