Are decisions by political parties more or less accepted than direct-democratic decisions? The literature on parties as brand names or labels suggests that the existence of political parties lowers information and transaction costs of voters by providing ideological packages. Building on this...

In many countries, betting in sports is highly regulated. In Germany, however, there are current debates whether regulation should be loosened. A crucial part of the argument is that sport bets could be qualified as ‘games of skill’ that are considered to be less dangerous by German Law than...

Information exchange in policy networks is usually attributed to preference similarity, influence reputation, social trust and institutional actor roles. We suggest that political opportunity structures and transaction costs play another crucial role and estimate a rich statistical network model...

The study of policy discourse comprises actor-centered and content-oriented approaches. We attempt to close the gap between the two kinds of approaches by introducing a new methodology for the analysis of political discourse called Discourse Network Analysis. It is based on social network...

The paper, based on a historic account of the theory of representation in German legal thought, seeks to understand what effect particracy has on democratic representation and thereby links a discourse dating back to the days of the Weimar Republic to the analytical approach to the political...

A robust feature of models of electoral competition between two opportunistic, purely office-motivated parties is that both parties become indistinguishable in equilibrium. I this short note, I show that this strong connection between the office motivation of parties and their equilibrium choice...

The nonexistence of equilibria in models of electoral competition involving multiple issues is one of the more puzzling results in political economics. In this paper, we relax the standard assumption that parties act as expected utility maximizers. We show that equilibria often exist when...

This article is concerned with the welfare properties of trade when the behavior of agents cannot be rationalized by preferences. I investigate this question in an environment of matching allocation problems. There are two reasons for doing so: firstly, the finiteness of such problems entails...

The paper introduces the assumption of costly information acquisition to the theory of mechanism design for matching allocation problems. It is shown that the assumption of endogenous information acquisition greatly changes some of the cherished results in that theory: in particular, the...

A version of the Second Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics that applies to a money-free environment, in which a set of indivisible goods needs to be matched to some set of agents, is established. In such environments, "trade" can be identified with the set of hierarchical exchange...