Religions are organized in a variety of ways. They may resemble an elected autocracy, a parliamentary democracy, or something akin to a monarchy, where heredity plays a primary role. This variation allows for a comparative study of their organization. These differing power arrangements call for...

We construct game theoretic foundations for bargaining in the shadow of a trial. Plaintiff and defendant both have noisy signals of a common-value trial judgment and make simultaneous offers to settle. If the offers cross, they settle on the average offer; otherwise, both litigants incur an...

By applying the standard tools of microeconomic analysis, the author argues that democratic markets work as well as economic markets. In particular, he shows that previous work has greatly exaggerated the existence of principal-agent and informational problems in electoral markets and has drawn...

"We show that status quo bias combined with downward-sloping demand implies addictive behavior. This result does not depend on transitivity, a complete ordering, or even the existence of a preference relation that rationalizes choices." ("JEL" D11, D81) Copyright (c) 2007 Western Economic...

Voters value valence characteristics such as honesty and competence. In this paper, we consider the situation where candidates may have more than one valence characteristic of importance to the voters. At the same time we introduce a new concept “the median-crossing property" which differs...