Rhetoric in legislative bargaining with asymmetric information

Rhetoric in Legislative Bargaining with Asymmetric Information

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. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. We sho...

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...

Legislative Bargaining with Endogenous Rules

Asymmetric Information and Legislative Rules: Some Amendments

We re-examine the major tenets of the informational theory of legislative rules, focusing on the informational efficiency of rules with varying degrees of restrictiveness. When committees are heterogeneous, full efficiency is attainable under the unrestrictive open rule as well as the somewhat restrictive modiÞed rule. In contrast, the restrictive closed rule always leads to inefficiencies. Whe...

Dynamic Legislative Bargaining with Veto Power∗

Many assemblies grant one or more of their members the right to block decisions even when a proposal has secured the necessary majority—a veto right. In this paper, I analyze the consequences of veto power in an infinitely repeated divide-the-dollar bargaining game with an endogenous status quo policy. The division of the dollar among legislators is unchanged until the committee agrees on a new...