We study the design of voting rules for committees representing heterogeneous groups (countries, states, districts) when cooperation among is voluntary. While efficiency recommends weighting proportionally to their stakes, we show that accounting participation constraints entails overweighting some groups, those which incentive cooperate lowest. When collective decisions are not enforceable, in...

The Revenue Equivalence Theorem is generalized to the case of asymmetric auctions in which each player’s valuation is drawn independently from a common support according to his/her distribution function. r 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D44; D72; D82

This short paper analyzes whether a federal transfer system can be designed to increase welfare, when state governments create political budget cycles to increase the likelihood of reelection. The results show how the federal government may announce a transfer scheme in advance for the post-election year that counteracts the welfare costs of political budget cycles. JEL Classification: D61, D72...

I introduce a model of corporate voting. I characterize the shareholder majority rule as the unique corporate voting rule that satisfies four axioms: anonymity, neutrality, share monotonicity, and merger, a property that requires consistency in election outcomes following stock-for-stock mergers. JEL classification: D71, D72, K22

I show that a unique equilibrium exists in an asymmetric two-player all-pay auction with a discrete signal structure, correlated signals, and interdependent valuations. The proof is constructive, and the construction can be implemented as a computer program and be used to derive comparative statics. I also characterize the set of equilibria when a reserve price is introduced. JEL Classification...

This chapter surveys formal models of endogenous alliance formation in political science and economics. Using a unified model of conflict, we obtain general results on the effect of group sizes on conflict and on the size of stable alliances. We also discuss recent work on endogenous sharing rules and dynamic alliance formation in nested conflicts. JEL Classification Numbers: D74, D72, C72

We present a model of information aggregation in which agents’ information is represented through partitions over states of the world. We discuss three axioms, meet separability, upper unanimity, and non-imposition, and show that these three axioms characterize the class of oligarchic rules, which combine all of the information held by a pre-specified set of individuals. JEL classification: D70...

We consider the class of proper monotonic simple games and study coalition formation when an exogenous share vector and a solution concept are combined to guide the distribution of coalitional worth. Using a multiplicative composite solution, we induce players’ preferences over coalitions in a hedonic game, and present conditions under which the semistrict core of the game is nonempty. JEL Clas...

We consider rent-seeking contests with two players that each have private information about their own cost of effort. We consider both discrete and continuous distributions of costs and give results for each case, focusing on existence of equilibria. JEL Classification: D72; C72

We introduce a path-based measure of convexity to be used in assessing the compactness of legislative districts. Our measure is the probability that a district will contain the shortest path between a randomly selected pair of its’ points. The measure is defined relative to exogenous political boundaries and population distributions. JEL classification: D72, K00, K19