This paper develops an economic perspective on political theory, as a guide to some problems and directions of current research. The electoral system and the allocation of powers to elected offices together define the game that politicians play. So democratic structures should be compared and...

The Poisson model of games with population uncertainty is extended, by allowing that expected population sizes and players' utility functions may depend on an unknown state of the world. Such extended Poisson games are applied to prove a generalization of the Condorcet jury theorem.

Earlier contributions have shown that imposing common knowledge of rationality is problematic when rationality is defined as choosing an admissible best response. Here we instead impose common knowledge of rational reasoning and define the concept of rationalizable sets. General existence (for...

A troubling aspect about power indices is how the values assigned to players can depend upon the index. As shown, the problem is more severe; different indices can generate radically different rankings; e.g., a 15-player game exists with over a trillion different strict power index rankings of...

An example shows that there are well-behaved infinte signaling games with no sequential equilibria. We explore the relationship between equilibrium outcomes of the infinite game and those of approximating games. Consider a sequence of signaling games approaching a limit game. A "(sub)sequence of...