This paper surveys alternative approaches to the emergence and evolution of institutions. The challenge is to develop frameworks capable of capturing both stability and change. We follow a “descaling” approach to show how founding assumptions about economics—namely, alternative assumptions...

The paper addresses the issue of rethinking the welfare state as a part of a broader national system of social protection (NSSP) and a mode of societal regulation. In order to overcome the theoretical limits of bottom-up comparative analysis of welfare states, one builds a structural model of...

Voting records indicate that dissents in monetary policy committees are frequent and predictability regressions show that they help forecast future policy decisions. In order to study whether the latter relation is causal, we construct a model of committee decision making and dissent where...

This paper develops a model where the value of the monetary policy instrument is selected by a heterogenous committee engaged in a dynamic voting game. Committee members differ in their institutional power, and in certain states of nature, they also differ in their preferred instrument value....

We study a legislature where decisions are made by playing an agenda-setting game. Legislators are concerned about their electoral prospects but they are also genuinely concerned for the legislature to make the correct decision. We show that when ideological polarization is positive but not too...

Given an argumentation framework and a group of agents, the individuals may have divergent opinions on the status of the arguments. If the group needsto reach a common position on the argumentation framework, the question is how the individual evaluations can be mapped into a collective one....

This short paper employs individual voting records of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of England to study heterogeneity in policy preferences among committee members. The analysis is carried out using a simple generalization of the standard New Keynesian framework that allows...

Given an argumentation framework and a group of agents, the individuals may have divergent opinions on the status of the arguments. If the group needs to reach a common po- sition on the argumentation framework, the question is how the individual evaluations can be mapped into a collective one....