Economists have long studied policy choice by a social planner who aims to maximize welfare in democracies or other political systems where, in some sense, welfare is intended to express the well-being of a society rather than the personal preferences of a dictator. The motivation for studying...

Some public goods are provided entirely with private contributions, others with a mixture of public and private funding, and still others are entirely publicly funded. To explain this variation, a model of dual provision is developed that endogenizes public and private funding. Members of the...

We propose a criterion of approximate incentive compatibility, strategy-proofness in the large (SP-L), and argue that it is a useful second-best to exact strategy-proofness (SP) for market design. Conceptually, SP-L requires that an agent who regards a mechanism's "prices" as exogenous to her...

This paper reviews the literature on governments' motivations for negotiating and joining international trade agreements. I discuss both normative explanations for trade agreements and explanations based on political-economy concerns. Most of the paper focuses on the purpose of multilateral...

We study a dynamic model of environmental protection in which the level of pollution is a state variable that strategically links policy making periods. Policymakers are forward looking but politically motivated: they have heterogeneous preferences and do not fully internalize the cost of...

Research on collective provision of private goods has focused on distributional considerations. This paper studies a class of problems of decision under uncertainty in which the argument for collective choice emerges from the mathematics of aggregating individual payoffs. Consider decision...

We show how to nonparametrically identify the distribution that characterizes heterogeneity among agents in a general class of structural choice models. We introduce an axiom that we term separability and prove that separability of a structural model ensures identification. The main strength of...

We consider dynamic processes of coalition formation in which a principal bargains sequentially with a group of agents. This problem is at the core of a variety of applications in economics and politics, including a lobbyist seeking to pass a bill, an entrepreneur setting up a start-up, or a...

Two laboratory experiments - one a statistical urn problem, the other a monetary policy experiment - were run to test the commonly-believed hypothesis that groups make decisions more slowly than individuals do. Surprisingly, this turns out not to be true there is no significant difference in...

We develop a dynamic model of board decision-making. We show that a board could retain a policy all directors agree is worse than an available alternative. Thus, directors may retain a CEO they agree is bad--a deadlocked board leads to an entrenched CEO. We explore how to compose boards and...