This paper analyzes the incentives of the members of a committee to acquire skills, when they will share a fixed budget among them in ex-post negotiations. Skills are interpreted as the ability to manage a collective budget, in the sense that shares assigned to skilled agents generate positive...

Empirical studies such as Goyal, van der Leij and Moraga (2006) or Newman (2004) show that scientific collaboration networks present a highly unequal and hierarchical distribution of links. This implies that some researchers can be much more active and productive than others and, consequently,...

This note analyzes the efficiency properties of the equilibrium in a multilateral bargaining game in which a legislature divides a budget among collective and particularistic goods. We extend the model of Volden and Wiseman (2007) by considering smooth utility functions and consensus...

It has been empirically shown that structural holes in social networks enable potential large benefits to those individuals who bridge them (Burt, 2004). The work in Goyal and Vega-Redondo (2007) shows that the large payoff differentials caused by structural holes can persist even when agents...