Many political institutions can be viewed as methods for achieving desired outcomes. The problem of institutional design is that of finding a mechanism that would result in those desired outcomes as game-theoretic equilibria. Some results from the institutional design literature are reviewed,...

The theory of computation and automata has occasionally aroused some interest among political scientists. The article outlines some early applications, although the main emphasis is on the most recent ones. We concentrate on the applications to bargaining and negotiation procedures. It is argued...