Two principals simultaneously appoint one agent each and decide how much power to give to their agents. The agents' task is to bargain over the provision of a public good. Power here means the right to decide the own side's provision if negotiations break down. In equilibrium the principals...

in a bargaining game over the provision of a public good, two principals appoint one agent each to carry out the bargaining. Each agent has preferences over the outcome. Two institutional set-ups are studied, each with a different level of authority given to the agents. By authority is here...

This study investigates in a two-stage two-player model how the decision to make an ultimatum and how much to demand depends on the impatience of the agents and the pie uncertainty. First, players simultaneously decide on their ultimatums. If the ultimatum(s) are compatible then the player(s)...

Experimentalists frequently claim that human subjects playing games in the laboratory violate such solution concepts as Nash equilibrium and subgame perfection. This claim is premature. What has been rejected are certain joint hypotheses about preferences, knowledge, and behavior. This note...

Saez-Marti and Weibull [4] investigate the consequences of letting some agents play a myopic best reply to the myopic best reply in Young's [8] bargaining model. This is how they introduce ''cleverness'' of players. We analyze such clever agents in general finite two-player games. We show that...

This paper provides axiomatic descriptions of social welfare relations, defined on infinite streams of utility, that are consistent with the utilitarian criterion on subsets where maximizing aggregate utility has a clear interpretation: the streams, or their differences, are summable. Besides...

This paper presents an infinite-horizon version of intergenerational utilitarianism. By studying discounted utilitarianism as the discount factor tends to one, we obtain a welfare criterion --- limit-discounted utilitarianism (LDU) --- that is analytically tractable, respects the Pareto order,...

This paper reconsiders the classical problem of majority voting over tax schedules, adding the possibility to avoid taxes. In this setting preferences over tax schedules are not determined by earned income, but rather by taxable income, which depends on the joint decisions of labor supply and...

There is an intensive dispute in political economics about the impact of institutions on income redistribution. While the main focus is on comparison between different forms of representative democracy, the influence of direct democracy on redistribution has attracted much less attention. In...

The present paper consists of two closely related parts: one which outlines a normative criterion for evaluating the legitimacy of constitutional change and one which specifies a particular proposal of a constitution. The criterion used stems directly from the "pragmatic" brand of...