Some international organizations are governed by unanimity rule, others by (simple or qualified) majority rules. Standard voting models, which assume that the decisions made by voting are perfectly enforceable, have a hard time explaining the observed variation in governance mode, and in...

We analyze the effort allocation choices of incumbent politicians when voters are uncertain about politician preferences. There is a pervasive incentive to “posture” by overproviding effort to pursue divisive policies, even if all voters would strictly prefer to have a consensus policy...

Existant studies of confl ict, negotiation and international relations do not take into account that the institutions used to resolve disputes shape the incentives for entering disputes in the first place. Because engagement in a costly and destructive war is the `punishment' for entering a...

This paper applies mechanism design to the study of international con flict resolution. Standard mechanisms in which an arbitrator can enforce her decisions are usually not feasible because disputants are sovereign entities. Nevertheless, we find that this limitation is inconsequential. Despite...

We consider how the incentives for politicians to pander to public opinion depend on preference heterogeneity and information. Politicians are more likely to pander on issues where politicians’ preferences are divided than on issues where there is a clear majority view. As pandering...

We establish a theoretical as well as empirical framework to assess the role of resource endowments and their geographic location for inter-State conflict. The main predictions of the theory are that conflict tends to be more likely when at least one country has natural resources; when the...

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because incumbents only care about clearing a reelection...

If voters of different countries adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, when these countries interact their leaders may find it impossible to agree on effcient policies especially in hard times. Political leaders’actions are bound by a “conformity constraint”that requires...

This paper proposes a theoretical explanation for the incremental integration path of Europe until the Monetary Union time. The dynamic partition function game suggests that the presence of externalities across coalitions affects the timing of admission of different players, the equilibrium...

We examine how natural resource location, rent sharing and fighting capacities of different groups matter for ethnic conflict. A new type of bargaining failure due to multiple types of potential conflicts (and hence multiple threat points) is identified. The theory predicts conflict to be more...