Expert agents, such as lawyers, play a prominent role in conflict resolution, yet little is known about how they affect outcomes. We construct a model that permits us to estimate the influence of agents and test whether the parties in a dispute face prisoner’s dilemma incentives. Using eighteen years of final-offer arbitration data from New Jersey, we find the parties do significantly better wh...

Background: ART contracts involving third parties have been created while clinical reproductive treatments are globally widespread. Iran is pioneer in applying these treatments in middle-east due to shii’at jurisprudence prescribing them. This key role in region, has raised Iranian jurists’ responsibility in developing a legal system regarding administration of ART. The most significant part of...

A central claim of democratic theory is that democracy induces governments to be responsive to the preferences of the people. Political parties organize politics in every modern democracy, and some observers claim that parties are what induce democracies to be responsive. Yet, according to others, parties give voice to extremists and reduce the responsiveness of governments to the citizenry. Th...

The requirements are clear that the exploration of the issues must be transparent, objective and comprehensive, and be included with a view to assist Parties in ratifying the Basel Ban Amendment. There are certain points in the present document that we believe are likely to fail the test of meeting fair standards of objectivity and comprehensiveness and moreover are, on balance, not aimed to as...

Retrospective voting is arguably one of the most important mechanisms of representative democracy, and whether or not the public holds the government accountable for its policy performance has been extensively studied. In this paper, we test whether retrospective voting extends to parties in the opposition, that is whether and how parties' past performance evaluations affect their vote, regardl...

We examine how campaign advertising affects electoral support. We propose a simple model where advertising disproportionately benefits non-dominant political parties, because voters are uncertain about and biased against such parties. We test this argument in Mexico, where one of the three main parties dominates in many localities. To identify the effects of exposure to campaign advertising, we...