Prior research on quot;strategic votingquot; has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous,...

Prior research on quot;strategic votingquot; has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous,...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game in which legislators privately informed about their preferences bargain over an ideological and a distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. When ideological...

We study a model of sequential bargaining in which, in each period before an agreement is reached, the proposer's identity is randomly determined, the proposer suggests a division of a pie of size one, each other agent either approves or rejects the proposal, and the proposal is implemented if...

Do mandatory spending programs such as Medicare improve efficiency? We analyze a model with two parties allocating a fixed budget to a public good and private transfers each period over an infinite horizon. We compare two institutions that differ in whether public good spending is discretionary...

We consider negotiations among the claimants of a bankrupt firm in which claimants have private information about various operational restructuring alternatives, and can communicate prior to a proposal. Our setup differs from typical bargaining games with incomplete information in two ways....

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary...

When a firm files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S., negotiations take place among its claimants to decide on what to do with the firm and who gets what. If an agreement cannot be reached, then the firm is likely be liquidated. Consequently, the liquidation value of the firm plays a crucial...

We build a structural model of Chapter 13 bankruptcy that captures salient features of personal bankruptcy under Chapter 13. We estimate our model using a novel data set that we construct from bankruptcy court dockets recorded in Delaware in 2001 and 2002. Our estimation results highlight the...