Formal versus informal legislative bargaining

Legislative bargaining with teams

We experimentally investigate the Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model of legislative bargaining with two player teams versus individuals. Teams pass minimum winning coalitions (MECs) significantly more often than individuals, meeting or beating the demanding truth wins norm. Teams have significantly more proposer power, and come significantly closer to the SSPE prediction. This results from proposers c...

Nash versus Schelling? The importance of constraints in legislative bargaining

When the Council of Ministers had to decide on the so-called chocolate directive in 1999, its plan to allow vegetable fat in the production of candy products met with fierce opposition from Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. These three member states objected to the usage of vegetable fats other than cocoa in chocolate. Although they advanced some consumer-friendly arguments, continental man...

Legislative Bargaining with Endogenous Rules

Legislative Bargaining under Weighted Voting1

Voting institutions commonly assign di®erent weights across voters. Most analyses of such systems assume that the relative in°uence of each player is non-linear in her voting weight. We reassess this assumption with a distributive bargaining game that closely resembles the closed-rule, in ̄nite-horizon Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model. In equilibrium, voters with lower weights are typically perfect s...

Legislative Bargaining under Weighted Voting

Organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting. We analyze this setting using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model. Unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory, we find that each voter’s expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight. An exception occurs when many high-weight voters exist, as low-weight voters may expect disp...