We present a game-theoretic model of political discourse that explores how strategic incentives to make potentially persuasive arguments vary across different informational contexts. We show that political sophistication of the listeners fundamentally affects the speakers' incentives to make...

We consider a principal-multiagent framework with adverse selection when contracting is possible ex ante. However, enforcement of contracts is imperfect, which results in inefficiencies. We study how group contracting may or may not mitigate those inefficiencies.

In this paper we primarily address the implications of the tort of defamation for the potential "chilling" effect by which the media are discouraged from exposing economic and political misdeeds. We argue that, in general, both the sanction for dishonesty and the compensation for defamation...

Within the framework of the generalized Wittman-Roemer model of political competition, this article provides a canonical example showing that political parties may matter in explaining how redistribution policies change with respect to changes in inequality. Some authors (Lee and Roemer, 2005;...

Most moral justifications for coercion have been based on one of two arguments: the consent of the coerced, usually understood as univariate and discrete, or the beneficial consequences of coercion; but many cases do not fit these categories. This paper proposes that consent be understood as our...

A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we construct a simple political-economy model that suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it...

Decisions about intervention can be understood as decisions about tolerance, because an act of tolerance is an act of nonintervention, and, conversely, an act of intervention can be understood as an act of intolerance. But acts of tolerance, typically made under conditions of epistemic...

I examine the case where fulfillment of a contractual commitment is only imperfectly verifiable and ask whether the court should then tell the truth regarding the action in dispute. I show that truth seeking does not maximize the expected surplus from contractual relationships. From the parties'...

This paper studies the constrained efficient intergovernmental transfer contract between the central government and the states in a federal economy. We consider an environment with moral hazard, incomplete enforceability, and date-0 negotiation costs. The interaction of moral hazard and...

An agent who is near-rational in the sense of Akerlof and Yellen makes a slight mistake which has only a first-order effect ohnhis own utility. If he is constrained by a participation constraint on another party, as in a principal-agent relationship, the result only holds when the agent is...