Generally, Democrats do not increase military spending, and Republicans do not raise welfare payments. Mostly, ruling politicians stick to the manifesto of their party. The current paper provides a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon that does not assume politicians or voters to be...

We perform an experiment where subjects pay for the right to participate in a shareholder vote. We find that experimental subjects are willing to pay a significant premium for the voting right even though there should be no such premium in our setup under full rationality. Private benefits from...

This paper studies state failure and governance in two conflict-states in the Middle East: Iraq and Somalia. Iraq is currently undergoing a social experiment under which a new form of government is being constructed after the passage of autocratic rule. The government envisaged is a...

This paper models the instability of peace agreements, motivated by the empirical regularity with which peace agreements tend to break down following civil war. When war provides opportunities for profit to one side, or when other difficulties such as historical grievances exist, peace may...

This paper explores the factors behind the time path of real spending and revenue in the West German states from 1975 to 2004. The empirical approach stresses robustness and takes into account a large set of economic and political variables. Our results suggest that common economic factors and,...

Individual leaders have been central to the transformation of political institutions, organizations and many instances of social and economic reform. Why are some leaders able to take advantage of opportunities to successfully catalyze large-scale change while others fail? In this paper we argue...

This paper investigates the suitability of apportionment methods based on the idea of preserving the coalition function of the simple game represented by the populations of the states. The results show that an apportionment method which satisfies desirable properties such as population...

We consider hedonic coalition formation games that are induced by a simple TU-game and a cooperative solution. For such models, Shenoy's (1979) absence of the paradox of smaller coalitions provides a sufficient condition for core existence. We present three different versions of his condition in...

In this paper we study hedonic coalition formation games in which players' preferences over coalitions are induced by a semi-value of a monotonic simple game with veto control. We consider partitions of the player set in which the winning coalition contains the union of all minimal winning...

We consider the class of proper monotonic simple games and study coalition formation when an exogenous weight vector and a solution concept are combined to guide the distribution power within winning coalitions. These distributions induce players' preferences over coalitions in a hedonic game....