This work follows the citizen candidate model of Besley and Coate (1997) to show that for a unidimensional policy issue, a moderate default policy rules out equilibrium outcomes in which there is an uncontested candidate. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

This paper studies the advantages that a coalition of agents in a larger electorate can obtain by forming a voting bloc to pool their votes and cast them all in one direction. We show under which conditions an agent will benefit from the formation of the voting bloc, whether being part of it or...

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...

Abstract I provide an axiomatic foundation for the assumption of specific utility functions in a multidimensional spatial model, endogenizing the spatial representation of the set of alternatives. Given a set of objects with multiple attributes, I find simple necessary and sufficient conditions...

Games with imperfect information often feature multiple equilibria, which depend on beliefs off the equilibrium path. Standard selection criteria such as <i>passive beliefs, symmetric beliefs or wary beliefs</i> rest on ad hoc restrictions on beliefs. We propose a new selection criterion that imposes...

I show that in a multidimensional spatial model, if an agent is risk neutral on each side of the policy space away from his/her ideal point, then his/her utility function is linearly decreasing not in the Euclidean, but rather in the city block distance to the ideal policy of the agent.