Employing a political-economics approach, this paper compares small states and unions when the former fail to internalize cross-border externalities of publicly provided goods. It discusses two types of unions: federations with more than one level of government and unitary states. While unitary...

Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981), fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone...

We consider a two period model in which an incumbent political party chooses the level of a current policy variable unilaterally, but faces competition from a political opponent in the future. Both parties care about voters payoffs, but they have different beliefs about how policy choices will...

I consider a two-period model in which being "too big" is only a necessary condition for an insolvent firm to receive a government bailout because, in addition to meeting a threshold asset size, the firm must engage in a lobbying contest in order to be bailed out. The firm has a political...

We analyze and evaluate the different decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to date. Most of the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue in favor of the nucleolus as...

The paper explores organizations designed to influence a group to choose specific alternatives from a set of possible choices. The perspective is that of an administrator that has personal objectives not shared by the group and can dictate organization but not group choice. The design works...

We offer a selective survey of the uses of cooperative and non-cooperative game theory in the analysis of legal rules and institutions. In so doing, we illustrate some of the ways in which law influences behavior, analyze the mechanism design aspect of legal rules and institutions, and examine...

This chapter surveys the literature on strategy proofness from a historical perspective. While I discuss the connections with other works on incentives in mechanism design, the main emphasis is on social choice models.

We build a game-theoretic model where aggression can be triggered by domestic political concerns as well as the fear of being attacked. In the model, leaders of full and limited democracies risk losing power if they do not stand up to threats from abroad. In addition, the leader of a fully...

Experiments can be used to relax technical assumptions that are made by necessity in theoretical analysis, and further test the robustness of theoretical predictions. To illustrate this point we conduct a three-person bargaining experiment examining the effect of different decision rules...