Public choice theory was initiated by economists and political scientists in the late-1950s and early 1960s and is generally described as the application of economic concepts and formulations to political phenomena. This essay explains that economizing action and public choice are universal...

An organization must make a binary choice in each of two periods. The optimal choice depends on an unknown state of nature. The leader of the organization has a stock of political capital and observes a private signal of the state. The leader faces an inter-temporal choice problem. She may...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of...

This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient...

Marengo and the second author have developed in the last years a geometric model of social choice when this takes place among bundles of interdependent elements, showing that by bundling and unbundling the same set of constituent elements an authority has the power of determining the social...

We present a geometric model of social choice when the latter takes place among bundles of interdependent elements, that we will call objects. We show that the outcome of the social choice process is highly dependent on the way these bundles are formed. By bundling and unbundling the same set of...

In [MP08] L. Marengo and C. Pasquali present a model of object construction in majority voting and show that, in general, by appropriate changes of such bundles, different social outcomes may be obtained. In this paper we extend and generalize this approach by providing a geometric model of...

Social choice models usually assume that choice is among exogenously given and non decomposable alternatives. Often, on the contrary, choice is among objects that are constructed by individuals or institutions as complex bundles made of many interdependent components. In this paper we present a...

A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior, these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...