This paper examines the Faustian dynamics of policy and power. We posit a general class of dynamic games in which current policies affect the future distribution of political power, resulting in the following "Faustian trade off": if the current ruler chooses his preferred policy, he then...

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated,n -person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how "much" cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group...

We model dynamic mechanisms for a global commons. Countries benefit from both consumption and aggregate conservation of an open access resource. A country's relative value of consumption-to-conservation is privately observed and evolves stochastically. An optimal quota maximizes world welfare...

This paper formulates a dynamic model of global carbon consumption in the absence of an effective international agreement. Each period, countries extract carbon from the global ecosystem. A country's output depends both on its carbon usage and on the ecosystem ("stored carbon"). The desired mix...

This paper adopts a revealed preference" approach to the question of what can be inferred about bias in a political system. We model an economy and its political system from the point of view of an outside observer." The observer sees a finite sequence of policy data, but does not observe either...

This paper studies the evolution of political institutions in the face of conflict. We examine institutional reform in a class of "pivotal mechanisms"-institutions that behave "as if" the resulting policy were determined by a "pivotal" decision maker drawn from the potential population of...

This paper introduces a class of games designed to study dynamic, endogenous reform of political institutions. Dynamic political games (DPGs) are dynamic games in which institutional choice is both recursive and instrumental. Future political aggregation rules are decided under current ones, and...