That historical inequality can affect long run macroeconomic performance has been argued by a large literature on endogenous inequality using models of indivisibilities in occupational choice, in the presence of borrowing constraints. These models are characterized by a continuum of steady...

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision rules...

Individual contributions by infringing firms to the compensation of cartel victims must reflect their 'relative responsibility for the harm caused' according to EU legislation. Several studies have argued that the theoretically best way to operationalize this norm is to apply the Shapley value...

Weighted committees allow shareholders, party leaders, etc. to wield different numbers of votes or voting weights as they decide between multiple candidates by a given social choice method. We consider committees that apply scoring methods such as plurality, Borda, or antiplurality rule. Many...

Executive Directors of the International Monetary Fund elect the Fund’s Managing Director from a shortlist of three candidates; financial quotas of IMF members define the respective numbers of votes. The implied a priori distribution of success (preference satisfaction) is compared across...

The paper investigates price formation in a decentralized market with random matching. Agents are assumed to have subdued social preferences: buyers, for example, prefer a lower price to a higher one but experience reduced utility increases below a reference price that serves as a common...

Power indices like those of Shapley and Shubik (1954) or Banzhaf (1965) measure the distribution of power in simple games. This paper points at a deficiency shared by all established indices: players who are inferior in the sense of having to accept (almost) no share of the spoils in return for...

The so-called paradox of democracy is approached as a variant of a more general class of so-called paradoxes of self-amendment. It is studied from a legal philosophy and a game theoretic point of view. Special attention is devoted to the risks and chances of inducing the foes of democracy to...

The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful ‘codecision makers’, understanding of the final stage of the...

This paper studies human capital investment in a spatial setting with interpersonal complementarities. A mixture of local and global social interactions affects the cost of acquiring education, and the return to human capital is determined endogenously in the market. We study how spatially...