In this note we introduce a general class of games where the payoff of every player are affected by her intrinsic taste for available strategic choices; intensity of her dyadic social interactions of with others in the peer group; and conformity effect. We show, that if the dyadic social...

In this paper, we lay the first building blocks of a positive theory of nation formation where national choices consist of the size and location of a public good. Individuals differ both in income and in their preferences for the public good location. Public expenditures are financed either by a...

We study majority voting over a bidimensional policy space when the voters' type space is either uni- or bidimensional. We show that a Condorcet winner fails to generically exist even with a unidimensional type space. We then study two voting procedures widely used in the literature. The...

In this paper we introduce the notion of stability threshold that quantifies the minimal returns to size sufficient to prevent credible secession threats by regions of the country. Severity of internal tension has been linked to degree of polarization of citizens' preferences and...

This paper presents a model of nation formation in which culturally heterogeneous agents vote on the optimal level of public spending. Larger nations benefit from increasing returns in the provision of public goods, but bear the costs of greater cultural heterogeneity. This tradeoff induces...