Any attempt to reform existing public policies or to implement new policies faces an arduous negotiation process and the tyranny of the status quo. One of the basic premises of the Uruguay Round of the GATT is that the reform of border policies could not be sustained without dramatic...

In a companion series of papers, we have described a new bargaining institution and the design of laboratory experiments to assess its performance (see Rausser and Simon [1991] and Harrison and Simon [1991]). In this paper we describe and evaluate the first series of pilot experiments. In...

In collective decision making, political alliances naturally arise and are critical to the negotiation processes that lead to the actual implementation of decisions. In the present context, an "alliance" refers simply to a group of political actors who share common, but not identical, interests...

This paper reports on our numerical analysis of the model developed in Rausser-Simon 1991a and 1991b. We will assume that the reader is thoroughly familiar with the latter paper and refer frequently to the terminology introduced there. Two conclusions were readily apparent from the paper. First,...

This paper proposes a noncooperative model of multilateral bargaining. The model can be viewed as an extension of the famous Stahl-Rubinstein bargaining game. Two players take turns proposing a division of a "pie." After one player has proposed a division, the other can accept or reject the...

The story of agriculture in Eastern Europe during the last quarter century is a story of policy driven by politics, rather than by sound economics. Even in the highly distorted economics of the socialist period, agricultural policy stands out as being singularly colored by ideological...

This paper describes a laboratory experiment design that has been developed to assess a new political economy institution for possible use in trade negotiations. The objective of this paper is to explain the implementation of this experimental design in the context of a "horizontal" model of a...

This paper describes the basic laboratory experiment design that has been developed to assess a new Multilateral Bargaining institution that may be used for trade negotiations. Our overall objective is to implement a series of laboratory experiments that tests the ability of this institutions to...

Models of economic systems involving government intervention by definition include some policy variables, or policy instruments, through which the policy in implemented. In general, economists have tended to view these variables as exogenously given. While convenient in dealing with some...

In the case of the U.S. agricultural policy, this paper shows how governmental intervention can be formally incorporated in a conditional-vector-error-correcting model. From the resulting theoretical framework and empirical analysis, formal hypotheses are tested regarding both forward and...