Abstract Two competing visions of federalism have long held sway. The first is centered on the idea of an administrative system of delegation based on a geographic partitioning of the polity. The second view sees federalism as a bottom-up structure in which the larger polity is a construct of...

Can a court system conceivably control opportunistic behavior if judges are selected from the same population as ordinary citizens and thus are no better than the rest of us? This paper provides a new and, as we claim, quite profound rational choice answer to that unsolved riddle. Adopting an...

Economic intuitions concerning rational behaviour in interactive social situations are shaped byidealized models which are regarded as “approximately true”. But ideal models cannot be meaningfullydeemed approximately true unless asymptotically convergent processes imply them as limit cases....