We study pre-vote interactions in a committee that enacts a welfare-improving reform through voting. Committee members use decentralized promises contingent on the reform enactment to influence the vote outcome. Equilibrium promises prevent beneficial coalitional deviations and minimize total...

We study legislative bargaining with two person teams versus individuals. Teams pass minimum winning coalitions significantly more often than individuals, meeting or beating the demanding truth wins criteria. Teams have more proposer power, coming significantly closer to the very unequal payoffs...

Despite the wide variety of agendas used in legislative settings, the literature on sophisticated voting has focused on two formats, the so-called Euro-Latin and Anglo-American agendas. In the current paper, I introduce a broad class of agendas whose defining structural features,...

Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision....

Models of repeated legislative bargaining typically assume that an agenda setter is randomly selected each period, even if the agenda setter in the previous period successfully passed a proposal. In reality, successful legislative agenda setters (e.g., speakers, committee chairs) tend to hold...

We study repeated legislative bargaining in an assembly that chooses its bargaining rules endogenously, and whose members face an election after each legislative term. An agenda protocol or bargaining rule assigns to each legislator a probability of being recognized to make a policy proposal in...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game in which legislators 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 ideological...