We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...

We study the interdependence of optimal tax and expenditure policies. An optimal policy requires that information on preferences is made available. We first study this problem from a general mechanism design perspective and show that efficiency is possible only if the individuals who decide on...

Early results on the emptiness of the core and the majority-rule-chaos results led to the recognition of the importance of modeling institutional details in political processes. A sample of the literature on game-theoretic models of political phenomena that ensued is presented. In the case of...

Governments often pursue procyclical fiscal policies, even though they reduce voter welfare. Is this because voters actually prefer procyclical policies? The analysis in this paper exploits the first individual-level evidence from an original survey of 12,000 respondents in 8 countries across...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer ' the seller ' follows from a non-trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device, whence...