Consider an agent (manager, artist, etc.) who has imperfect private information about his productivity. At the beginning of his career (period 1, short run"), the agent chooses among publicly observable actions that generate imperfect signals of his productivity. The actions can be ranked...

Two players need to agree to adopt a certain option, otherwise the status quo is maintained. The correct choice depends of an unknown state variable. While both players would like the correct choice to be made, their relative concern with the two types of mistakes may differ and is private...

We study reforms of non-linear income tax systems from a political economy perspective. We present a median voter theorem for monotonic tax reforms, reforms so that the change in the tax burden is a monotonic function of income. We also provide an empirical analysis of tax reforms, with a focus...

Are reforms towards individual taxation politically feasible? Are they desirable from a welfare perspective? We develop a method to answer such questions and apply it to the US federal income tax since the 1960s. Main findings are: As of today, Pareto-improvements require a move away from joint...

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...

When voting takes place in democratic institutions, we find (either explicitly or implicitly) that there is an agenda setter or a formateur. Such players are uniquely able to make substantive proposals for given topics. Their statuses remain intact even after rejection of proposals, but they...

The launch of a public project requires support from enough members of a group. Members (players) are differently important for the project and have different cost/benefit relations. There are players who profit and players who suffer from the launch of the project. Examples are the Kyoto...

Governments often provide their citizens with goods and services that are also supplied in markets: education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social image. We show that image...

Theories about unique equilibrium selection are often rejected in experimental investigations. We drop the idea of selecting a single prominent equilibrium but suggest the coexistence of different beliefs about "appropriate" equilibrium or non-equilibrium play. Our main selection criterion is...

In Binary Threshold Public Good (BTPG) games n players contribute or not to the production of a public good which is produced if and only if there are at least k contributors. The BTPG games with the highest (k=n) and the lowest (k=1) threshold are the Stag Hunt game and the Volunteer's Dilemma....