We consider a simple political-economic model where capitalist investment is constrained by the government's temptation to expropriate. Political liberalization can relax this constraint, increasing the government's revenue, but also increasing the ruler's political risks. We analyze the ruler's...

We consider a model of two-candidate elections with a one-dimensional policy space. Spending on campaign advertisements can directly influence voters' preferences, and contributors give the money for campaign spending in exchange for promised services if the candidate wins. we find that the...

Earlier derivations of scoring rules, by Smith(1973) and Young(1975), assumed that a voter can express only a rank ordering of the alternatives on his or her ballot. This paper shows that scoring rules can be derived without this ordering assumption. It is shown that a voting rule must be a...

This paper compares the incentives to create obstructive committee systems under different constitutionally specified requirements for passing legislation. The Shapley value is used to measure the distribution of bargaining power in the legislature. If the legislature is bicameral or the...

This paper develops an economic perspective on political theory, as a guide to some problems and directions of current research. The electoral system and the allocation of powers to elected offices together define the game that politicians play. So democratic structures should be compared and...

A general class of models is developed for analyzing games with population uncertainty. Within this general class, a special class of Poisson games is defined. It is shown that Poisson games are uniquely characterized by properties of independent actions and enviornmental equivalence. The...

The Poisson model of games with population uncertainty is extended, by allowing that expected population sizes and players' utility functions may depend on an unknown state of the world. Such extended Poisson games are applied to prove a generalization of the Condorcet jury theorem.

Consider the linear incentive constraints that define the correlated equilibria of a game. The duals of these constraints generate Markov chains on the players' strategy sets. The stationary distributions for these Markov chains can be interpreted as the strategies in a reduced game, which is...

Formal theories of the internal organization of legislatures have mainly focused on the United States Congress. While these models have been successful in showing why committee systems should emerge in Congress, they fail to explain the variance in internal organization across legislatures which...

It is commonly argues that reducing the number of hours worked by the employed would lead to lower unemployment, since firms will respond by hiring more workers. This paper examines the relationship between hours worked and unemployment, in the context of an efficiency wage model where...