The decision-making rules of the European Union (EU) are defined in an incomplete contract signed by 15 national governments. The design of the contract defines the set of policy issues where it applies – in decision-making rules i.e. the majority rules and the division of powers among the...

A team must select among competing projects that differ in their payoff consequences for its members. Each agent chooses a project and exerts costly effort affecting its random completion time. When one or more projects are complete, agents bargain over which one to implement. A consensus...

People with a self-control problem often seek relief through social interactions rather than binding commitments. Thus, in self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous etc, members are said to achieve better personal outcomes by mainly sharing their experiences. In other...

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...

Should privately informed agents with diverging interests act independently or should they commit to a mechanism? This paper analyzes different communication and decision protocols when communication involves delay. It studies under which conditions agents should (i) choose their actions...

When an individual performs several tasks simultaneously, resources must be allocated to different brain systems to produce energy for neurons to fire. Following the evidence from neuroscience, we model the brain as an organization in which a coordinator allocates limited resources to the brain...

This paper considers dynamic games in which multiple principals contract sequentially and non-cooperatively with the same agent and provides characterization results useful for applications. Our benchmark model is one of private contracting in which downstream principals do not observe upstream...

In the basic adverse selection model, a seller makes a contract offer to a privately informed buyer. A fundamental hypothesis of incentive theory is that the seller may want to offer a menu of contracts to separate the buyer types. In the good state of nature, total surplus is not different from...

The method of sale of a corporation's shares has important effects on its value and future performance. The market for shares is composed of both small investors purchasing shares for portfolio reasons and large investors with an interest in obtaining control. This inherent asymmetry is critical...

This Paper contributes ideas and analysis to the ongoing EU reform debate. It consists of three distinct parts: voting in the Council of Ministers, restructuring the ECB's Governing Council, and the setting of enlargement “examination” dates. The IGC currently focuses on Council voting,...