Many rent-sharing decisions in a society result from a bargaining process between groups of individuals (such as between the executive and the legislative branches of government, between legislative factions, between corporate management and shareholders, etc.). We conduct a laboratory study of...

We develop a model of endogenous party platform formation in a multidimensional policy space. Party platforms depend on the composition of the parties? primary electorate. The overall social outcome is taken to be a weighted average of party platforms and individuals vote strategically....

We report results of an experimental study of multi-object uniform and discriminatory-price auctions in an environment of publicly known common values, concentrating on an environment where theory predicts sharply different results of the two auction formats. We find that the bidding behavior in...

All sovereign governments face a commitment problem: how can they promise to honor their own agreements? The standard solutions involve reputation or political institutions capable of tying the hands of the government. Mexico's government in the 1880s used neither solution. It compensated its...