Comprehensive reforms often fail or become piecemeal during preparatory phase of the legislation. A promising candidate to explain the failure of comprehensive reforms is vote trading on a subset of individual bills included in the original comprehensive reform. When legislators expect...

We study the implications of reciprocity on agenda setting in a sequential policy decision. We designed a laboratory experiment in which a committee decides sequentially on three independent bills. Selfish committee members would turn down all bills but reciprocity allows for implicit vote...