This paper examines the effects of political pressure groups (lobbies) on the emissions abatement decisions of countries and on the stability of international environmental agreements. We consider two types of lobbies, industry and environmentalists. We determine the influence of lobby-groups on...

We consider a (pure) public goods provision problem with voluntary participation in a quasi-linear economy. We propose a new hybrid solution concept, the free-riding-proof core (FRP-Core), which endogenously determines a contribution group, public goods provision level, and how to share the...

In this paper we consider a model with multiple jurisdictions where each formed jurisdiction selects a public project from the given uni-dimensional set, equally shares its cost among its members and places the project at the location of its median resident. We examine a cooperative concept of...

A group of N individuals must choose between two collective alternatives. Under Quadratic Voting (QV), agents buy votes in favor of their preferred alternative from a clearing house, paying the square of the number of votes purchased; the sum of all votes purchased determines the outcome. We...

This paper considers Bayesian and Nash implementation in exchange economic environments with state dependent preferences and feasible sets. We fully characterize Bayesian implementability for both diffuse and non-diffuse information structures. We show that, in exchange economic environments...

We investigate situations in which players make costly contributions as group members in a group conflict, and at the same time engage in contest with fellow group members to appropriate the possible reward. We introduce within group power asymmetry and complementarity in members'efforts, and...

We investigate the implementation of social choice functions (SCFs) from an epistemological perspective. We consider the possibility that in higher-order beliefs there exists an honest agent who is motivated by intrinsic preference for honesty as well as material interest. We assume weak...

In a society composed of a ruler and its citizens: what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? This paper approaches this problem as a game played between a ruler who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income and a group of agents/citizens who have the...

Strategy-proofness, requiring that truth-telling be a dominant strategy, is a standard concept in social choice theory. However, this concept has serious drawbacks. In particular, many strategy-proof mechanisms have multiple Nash equilibria, some of which produce the wrong outcome. A possible...

Using data from an experiment by Forsythe, Myerson, Rietz, and Weber (1993), designed for a different purpose, we test the "standard theory" that players have preferences only over their own mentary payoffs and that play will be in (evolutionary stable) equilibrium. In the experiment each...