In this paper we analyze a legislative bargaining game in which parties privately informed about their preferences bargain over an ideological and a distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. When the private...

Decision makers lacking crucial specialist know-how often consult with better informed but biased experts. In our model the decision maker's choice problem is binary and her preferred option depends on the state of the world unknown to her. The expert observes the state and sends a report to the...

We consider a committee voting setup with two rounds of voting where committee members, who possess private information about the state of the world, have to make a binary decision. We investigate incentives for truthful revelation of their information in the first voting period. Coughlan (2000)...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness....

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed...

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...

In innovation contests, the progress of the competing firms in the innovation process is usually their private information. We analyze an innovation contest in which research firms have a stochastic technology to develop innovations at a fixed cost, but their progress is publicly announced. We...

We present a model in which the media provide voters with information that is tainted by their own preferences, and derive an equilibrium in which media endorsements influence voting behavior. Competition for media endorsement causes political parties to adopt more centrist policies, which...

We suggest a model of electoral competition between two parties which is extended by a third player : mass media. The classical one-dimensional competition model is changed by introducing an issue-specific sensibility-coefficient and by allowing for non-voting. The winner is selected by majority...

In this paper we have investigated how the employment relationship, if it implies transfer of rents, may allow employers to control the voting behavior of their workers and lead to a strategic registration of voters. This is feasible when individual voting behavior is observable, as in open...