Policy debates on trade and the environment frequently refer to a need for countries linked by trade to co-ordinate, or even harmonise, their purely domestic environmental policies. Underlying this argument is a concern that national governments will not fully internalise environmental...

We consider the class of proper monotonic simple games and study coalition formation when an exogenous share vector and a solution concept are combined to guide the distribution of coalitional worth. Using a multiplicative composite solution, we induce players' preferences over coalitions in a...

This paper studies the advantages that a coalition of agents obtains by forming a voting bloc to pool their votes and cast them all together. We identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent to benefit from the formation of the voting bloc, both if the agent is a member of the...

Previous work on the formation and stability of cartels has focused on the case of identical players. This assumption is very restrictive in many economic environments. This paper analyses stability of cartels in games with heterogeneous players and spillovers to non-members. I introduce a...

A stable government is by definition not dominated by any other government. However, it may happen that all governments are dominated. In graph-theoretic terms this means that the dominance graph does not possess a source. In this paper we are able to deal with this case by a clever combination...

An incumbent government maximizes its chances of being reelected. Its objective function encompasses both social welfare and political contributions. Its only instrument is a pollution tax. In an open-economy context, we introduce an eco-industry in addition to lobbies of polluting firms and...

This paper investigates the relative impact of regional energy production on the legislative choices of Russian Duma deputies on energy regulation between 1994 and 2003. We apply Poole's optimal classification method of roll call votes using an ordered probit model to explain energy law reform...

We present a general model of two players contest with two types of efforts. Contrary to the classical models of contest, where each player chooses a unique effort, and where the outcome depends on the efforts of all the players, contestants are allowed to reduce the effort of the opponent....

Citizens are willing to abandon their short-term financial interest in free-riding considerably, if governments act in their interest, if procedures of the public decisions-making process are felt to be fair and if other fellow-citizens have to contribute also an adequate share to the community....