In this paper we consider a model of the country with heterogeneous population and examine compensation schemes that may prevent a threat of secession by dissatisfied regions. We show that horizontal imbalances are combatable with secession-proof compensation schemes that entail a degree of...

Electoral platform convergence is perceived unfavorably by both the popular press and many academic scholars. This paper provides a formal account of these perceived negative effects. We show that when parties do not know voters' preferences perfectly, voters prefer some platform divergence to...

This paper disentangles the topological assumptions of classical results (e.g., Walker (1977)) on existence of maximal elements from rationality conditions. It is known from the social choice literature that under the standard topological conditions—with no other restrictions on...

This paper establishes existence of a stationary Markov perfect equilibrium in general stochastic games with noise — a component of the state that is nonatomically distributed and not directly affected by the previous period’s state and actions. Noise may be simply a payoff irrelevant public...