Much of the social choice literature has tried to skirt around the main conclusion which it has come up with. The literature seems to imply that the world is in disequilibrium, yet it keeps trying to model the process in terms of equilibrium models and to search for conditions which guarantee...

This essay reports on some experiments designed to study two candidate electoral competition when voters are ‘retrospective’ voters. The experiments consist of a sequence of elections in which subjects play the part of both voters and candidates. In each election the incumbent adopts a...

While our experimental results do not show convincingly the superiority of our model over alternative hypotheses, these results do not reject the rational expectations approach to handling incomplete information in elections. This is not to say, of course, that our model provides the most...

This essay reports the results of ninety 3-person and 5-person bargaining experiments using several alternative vote trading scenarios. These experiments are designed to test: (1) Riker and Brams' controversial hypothesis that vote trading can yield inferior outcomes as against the alternative...

Over a variety of experimental designs, including vote trading games and committee games with both spatial and finite alternatives, the Competitive Solution has received considerable support. But the experiments that we report here do not replicate that support. Hence, while we maintain our...

When Congress delegates a policy mandate to a regulatory agency, Congress acts as a principal, choosing the institutional arrangements, or the ‘rules of the game’ for agency decision making. Individuals in the agency, acting as agents, take the rules of the game as given and do the best they...