Some committees convene behind closed doors while others publicly discuss issues and make their decisions. This paper studies the role of open and closed committee decision making in presence of external influence. We show that restricting the information of interest groups may reduce the bias...

Generally, Democrats do not increase military spending, and Republicans do not raise welfare payments. Mostly, ruling politicians stick to the manifesto of their party. The current paper provides a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon that does not assume politicians or voters to be...

Individual leaders have been central to the transformation of political institutions, organizations and many instances of social and economic reform. Why are some leaders able to take advantage of opportunities to successfully catalyze large-scale change while others fail? In this paper we argue...

This paper investigates the suitability of apportionment methods based on the idea of preserving the coalition function of the simple game represented by the populations of the states. The results show that an apportionment method which satisfies desirable properties such as population...

We consider hedonic coalition formation games that are induced by a simple TU-game and a cooperative solution. For such models, Shenoy's (1979) absence of the paradox of smaller coalitions provides a sufficient condition for core existence. We present three different versions of his condition in...

We consider the class of proper monotonic simple games and study coalition formation when an exogenous weight vector and a solution concept are combined to guide the distribution power within winning coalitions. These distributions induce players' preferences over coalitions in a hedonic game....