When should one pay the ferryman? When to pay for the delivery of a good and how to invest in a public good if there is a single transaction and institutions are costly? We show how to solve the hold-up problem. The idea is to appropriately split up the desired total contribution into several...

We consider collective decisions made by agents whose preferences and power depend on past events and decisions. Faced with an ineffcient equilibrium and an opportunity to commit to a policy, can the agents reach an agreement on such a policy? Under an intuitive condition linking power...