A Distributive N-Amendment Game with Endogenous Agenda Formation

In this paper I analyze a 3-person voting game in which players sequentially choose amendments to a bill and then vote sophisticatedly on the resulting agenda. This game differs from previous work on endogenous agenda formation in that the number of items on the agenda is not fixed. Players keep making proposals until they can do no better. I find that there is a nonempty set of minimax equilibrium outcomes to the game, and that this set contains the simple von Neumann-Morgenstern stable set. Assistant Professor, Department of Government and Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University; [email protected]. I am grateful to David Austen-Smith, Kim Border, John Duggan, Matthew Jackson, Jonathan Katz, Scott Page, Tom Palfrey, John Patty, Ken Shepsle, and especially to Richard McKelvey for their comments and advice.