Overwhelming anecdotal evidence suggests that politicians often promise more during an election campaign than they are willing or able to deliver once elected. In this paper, we present two signaling models to explain this phenomenon. In the first model, two candidates maximize their share of...

As with the market for goods and services, democratic competition involves political parties offering their services (policy programs) to citizen-consumers who vote for their preferred partisan supplier. Little is known about the partial effect of a shift in parties' seat shares for given voter...

In this paper we model the commercial lobbying industry (such as the so-called K-Street lobbyists of Washington, D.C.). In contrast to classical special interest groups commercial lobbying firms are not directly motivated by policy outcomes. They exist to make profits by selling intermediaries...

We provide a solution to the free-rider problem in the provision of a public good. To this end we define a biased indirect contribution game which provides the efficient amount of the public good in non-cooperative Nash equilibrium. No confiscatory taxes or other means of coercion are used. We...

This paper experimentally investigates the effect of limits on campaign spending and outcome in an electoral contest where two candidates, an incumbent and a challenger, compete for office in terms of the amount of campaign expenditure. The candidates are asymmetric only in that the incumbent...

This paper explores the role of pooled-producer, e.g. private label, trade intermediation in shaping the range and diversity of exports. Direct sales maintain a firm's unique product characteristics (brand equity), whereas trade through an intermediary can take two forms - either a wholesaling...

This paper provides a new explanation why several US states have implemented supermajority requirements for tax increases. We model a dynamic and stochastic OLG economy where individual preferences depend on age and change over time in a systematic way. In this setting, we show that the first...

This paper argues that, in the absence of a strong membership incentive within the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), a top-down institutional convergence of CIS countries towards European standards – i.e. democracy and market economy – is unlikely to be successful. However, due to...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...