We introduce tax contracts and examine how they affect government formation and welfare of voters in a democracy with proportional elections. A tax contract specifies a range of tax rates a party is committed to if in government. We develop a new model of party competition in which parties...

We develop a model of simultaneous and sequential voting in a committee where members do not share their private information and do not have the same preferences. When objective functions differ, an optimal order in the sequential game can be found, leading to a unique socially optimal...

Scholars making economic policy recommendations to resolve corruption problem use several approaches, the most dominant of which are the principal-agent and rent-seeking theories. In this paper, we argue that the principal-agent theory has problems accounting for the environment in which the...

It is found that the “Theory of Moves” is adequate in a Cold War scenario, with functionally equal participants, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The destabilization of normal incentive systems, under power and information asymmetry, is what prevents an equilibrium from being reached, as...

The classic theory of fiscal federalism suggests that different people should have different governments. Yet, separate local governments with homogeneous constituents often end up doing poorly. This paper explains why and answers three questions: when regions are heterogeneous, what determines...

We study dominant strategy incentive compatible (DIC) and deterministic mechanisms in a social choice setting with several alternatives. The agents are privately informed about their preferences, and have single-crossing utility functions. Monetary transfers are not feasible. We use an...

We characterize the optimal structure of prizes in contests, when the contest designer is interested in the maximization of either the expected total e¢çort or the expected highest e¢çort. The all-pay auction framework in the present paper makes it possible to derive all the results in Benny...

We analyse committees of voters who take a decision between two options as a two- stage process. In a discussion stage, voters share non-verifiable information about a private signal concerning what is the best option. In a voting stage, votes are cast and one of the options is implemented. We...