Flexible Integration as an Efficient Decision-Making Rule

In this paper we combine a non-cooperative decision-making game in a federal structure with two levels of interest and an incomplete contract which sets the rules of the game. The question we pose is how to combine ex ante efficiency of the design with ex post efficiency of the outcomes in the decision-making game. The paper shows that in common policies there are no designs that lead to both types of efficiency but flexible integration is a way to achieve both.