This paper extends Che and Gale (1998) by allowing the incumbent politician to have a preference for the policy position of one of the lobbyists. The effect of a contribution cap is analyzed where two lobbyists contest for a political prize. The cap always helps the lobbyist whose policy...

This paper discusses institutional reforms that might strengthen the role of the European Parliament in the policymaking process of the European Union. Using simple game theory, the paper analyzes the working properties of the different implementation procedures that are known as 'comitology'....

This paper explores the conditions under which compliance with a social contract establishes an equilibrium in a society. It is assumed that society consists of two groups, one of which has a comparative advantage in using violence, whereas the other one has a comparative advantage in producing...

We experimentally study behavior in a simple voting game where players have private information about their preferences. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences, which leads to inefficiency. We analyze an exogenous linking...

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...

We study a game theoretic model of a parliamentary democracy under proportional representation where `citizen candidates' form parties, voting occurs and governments are formed. We study the coalition governments that emerge as functions of the parties' seat shares, the size of the rents from...

Players are assumed to rank each other as coalition partners. Two processes of coalition formation are defined and illustrated: i) Fallback (FB): Players seek coalition partners by descending lower and lower in their preference rankings until some majority coalition, all of whose members...

This paper considers the policy outcome of a contest between two opposing in-terest groups: the incumbent fishermen and a group of conservationalists. The objective of the fishermen is to maximize profit, and they are (partly) concerned over future profitability as well, while the...

The concept of fair representation of voters in a committee representing different voters' groups, such as national representations in union of states, is discussed. This concept, introduced into discussion about voting rights in the Council of European Union in 2004, was narrowed to proposal of...

The European Union (EU) is not de jure a federation, but after 50 years of institutional evolution it possesses attributes of a federal state. One can conclude that EU is something between federation and intergovernmental organization. If we measure something between by interval [0, 1], where 0...