A firm may induce voters or elected politicians to support a policy it favors by suggesting that it is more likely to invest in a district whose voters or representatives support the policy. In equilibrium, no one vote may be decisive, and the policy may gain strong support though the majority...

A well-known rationale for representative democracy is that direct democracy leads to a free-rider problem as to the collection of information. A problem with this rationale is that it takes for granted that representatives collect information. In this paper we examine whether or not electoral...

Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a...

Some committees are made up of experts, persons interested in both the (subject) matter at hand and in coming across as able decision-makers. Such committees would like to conceal disagreement from the public. We present a theory that describes the reaction of experts to the requirement to...

We analyze general equilibrium relationships between trade policy and the household distribution of income, decomposing social welfare into real income level and variance components through Gini and Atkinson indexes. We embed these inequality-adjusted social welfare functions in a general...

In a multiperiod setting, decision-makers can learn about the consequences of their decisions through experimentation. In this paper we examine how in a two-party system polarization and political instability affect learning through experimentation. We distinguish two cases: <OL> <LI>the decision to be...</li></ol>

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians may have stronger incentives to behave...