This paper develops a political-economy model of the budget process focusing on the common pool problem of the public budget. We show that the externality arising from the fact that public spending tends to be targeted at individual groups in society while the tax burden is widely dispersed...

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to nonoptimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to non-optimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

Weighted committees allow shareholders, party leaders, etc. to wield different numbers of votes or voting weights as they decide between multiple candidates by a given social choice method. We consider committees that apply scoring methods such as plurality, Borda, or antiplurality rule. Many...

In dynamic resource allocation models, the non-existence of voting equilibria is a generic phenomenon due to the multi-dimensionality of the choice space even with agents heterogeneous only in their discount factors. Nevertheless, at each point of time there may exist a "median voter" whose...

We study the problem of locating a single public good along a segment when agents have single-dipped preferences. We ask whether there are unanimous and strategy-proof rules for this model. The answer is positive and we characterize all such rules. We generalize our model to allow the set of...

We consider the problem of allocating infinitely divisible commodities among a group of agents. Especially, we focus on the case where there are several commodities to be allocated, and agents have continuous, strictly convex, and separable preferences. In this paper, we establish that the...

It is argued that if opportunity sets are properly embedded in an interactive environment then the lattice of set-inclusion order filters of opportunity sets is the most suitable domain for opportunity rankings. A simple characterization of the cardinality-based preorder in terms of certain...

We analyze bankruptcy problems with an indivisible object, where real owners and outside traders want to allocate an indivisible object among them with monetary compensation. The object might be a company that has gone bankrupt or a house left by a parent who has died, and so on. We show that...