One feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power. Game-theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote...

We study a one dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have character and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. However, character is desirable, and a voter's utility is a...

We model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote. We adopt a number of simplifying assumptions: the founders and the candidates are fixed; the society operates for k periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period; one vote is...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of...

We study experimentally the effectiveness of communication in common value committees exhibiting publicly known heterogeneous biases. We test models assuming respectively self-interested and strategic-, joint payoff-maximizing- and cognitively heterogeneous agents. These predict varying degrees...

When politicians have lower discount factors than voters, democratic elections cannot sufficiently motivate politicians to undertake long-term socially beneficial projects. When politicians can offer incentive contracts which become effective upon reelection, the hierarchy of contracts and...