We provide characterizations of the set of outcomes that can be achieved by agenda manipulation for two prominent sequential voting procedures, the amendment and the successive procedure. Tournaments and super-majority voting with arbitrary quota q are special cases of the general sequential...

We offer complete characterizations of the equilibrium outcomes of two prominent agenda voting institutions that are widely used in the democratic world: the amendment, also known as the Anglo-American procedure, and the successive, or equivalently the Euro-Latin procedure. Our axiomatic...

We study how conflict in a contest game is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our main motivation stems from the analysis of socio-political conflict. The relevant theoretical prediction in our setting is that conflict expenditures are...

We study the process by which subordinated regions of a country can obtain a more favourable political status. In our theoretical model a dominant and a dominated region first interact through a voting process that can lead to different degrees of autonomy. If this process fails then both...

Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the...

Scheduling jobs of decentralized decision makers that are in competition will usually lead to cost inefficiencies. This cost inefficiency is studied using the Price of Anarchy (PoA), i.e., the ratio between the worst Nash equilibrium cost and the cost attained at the centralized optimum. First,...

We study an interactive framework that explicitly allows for non-rational behavior. We do not place any restrictions on how players can deviate from rational behavior. Instead we assume that there exists a lower bound p 2 [0; 1] such that all players play and are believed to play rationally with...

Economic predictions are highly sensitive to model and informational specifications. Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) show that, in static games with incomplete information, only very weak predictions, namely, the interim correlated rationalizable (ICR) actions, are robust to higher-order belief...

We introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response. Unlike standard level-k models, in this framework the player's `depth of reasoning' is endogenously determined, and it can be disentangled from his beliefs over his opponent's cognitive bound. In our approach, individuals...

In contrast to the simplifying assumption of selfishness, social incentives have been shown to play a role in economic interactions. Before incorporating social incentives into models and policies, however, one needs to know their efficiency relative to standard pay-for-performance incentives....