I consider the design of policy making institutions to aggregate preferences and information. The mechanism design approach makes it possible to consider a large set of institutions or game forms in which participants take observable actions prior to voting. A pervasive incentive problem is...

We consider accountability in repeated elections with two long-lived parties that have distinct policy preferences and different levels of valence. In each period the government faces a privately observed feasibility constraint and selects a publicly observed policy vector. While pure strategy...

This paper develops a model of campaign contributions and electoral competition. Contributors have separable preferences over policy and the electoral success of the candidate they support, as in influence buying. Policy preferences are single peaked over a single policy dimension. A candidate's...

Most campaigns do not revolve around policy commitments; instead, we think of campaigns as contests in which candidates spend time, energy and money to win. This paper develops models of electoral competition in which candidates select levels of effort. The analysis offers insights into which...

This paper shows why states, acting in their own self-interest, may create informational asymmetries that lead to war. In our model, two actors with no private information invest in military capacity before engaging in crisis bargaining. If bargaining fails, the states go to war, and the payoffs...

We consider a two-period model of elections in which voters have private information about their policy preferences. A first-period vote can have two types of consequences: it may be pivotal in the first election and it provides a signal that affects candidates' positions in the second election....