This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness....

In simple textbook treatment of bilateral exchange traders end up on the contract curve such that the trading surplus is maximized regardless of any asymmetric bargaining power they might have. However, that need not be true when the terms of exchange are determined by uncooperative bargaining,...

We show that bounds like those of Al-Najjar and Smorodinsky (J. Econ. Theory, 2000) as well as of Gradwohl et al. (Math. Oper. Res., 2009) on the number of alpha-pivotal agents can be obtained by decomposition of variance. All these bounds have a similar asymptotic behaviour, up to constant...