We seek to explain the puzzle of passive industry interests. Taking the formation decision as given, we focus on the ability of a political action committee (PAC) to elicit voluntary donations for campaign giving. We show that, when the number of stakeholders is large and uncertain, PACs behave...

We investigate private provision of discrete public goods under refund and cost-sharing. If it is commonly believed that individuals may be warm-glow altruists and the group-size is a Poisson random variable, then the equilibrium distribution of collected contributions is uniquely determined. If...

The Besley-Coate model of representative democracy has the problem of multiple equilibria (Besley-Coate 1997). We show that requiring the Besley-Coate political equilibria to be iteratively undominated at the voting stage refines the set of (pure strategy) political equilibrium outcomes only for...

This paper studies a model where the power to set policy (a choice of project) may be assigned to central or regional government via either a federal or unitary referendum. The benefit of central provision is an economy of scale, while the cost is political inefficiency. The relationship between...

This paper shows that when agents on both sides of the market are heterogeneous, varying in their costs of investment, ex ante investments by firms and workers (or buyers and sellers more generally) may be too high when followed by stochastic matching and bargaining over quasi-rents. The...