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...

How do we understand national climate change politics in the United States? Using a methodological innovation in network analysis, this paper analyzes discussions about the issue within the US Congress. Through this analysis, the ideological relationships among speakers providing Congressional...

This paper investigates Nash equilibrium under the possibility that preferences may be incomplete. I characterize the Nash-equilibrium-set of such a game as the union of the Nash-equilibrium-sets of certain derived games with complete preferences. These games with complete preferences can be...

Four papers that use ambiguity aversion in political economy are reviewed. The first two (Bade, 2011a and 2011b) find that two important puzzles (equilibrium existence with multidimensional issue spaces and platform convergence) of the Downs-Hotelling model of electoral competition can be...

The study of matching problems typically assumes that agents precisely know their preferences over the goods to be assigned. Within applied contexts, this assumption stands out as particularly counterfactual. Parents typically do invest a large amount of time and resources to find the best...

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...

Papai’s <CitationRef CitationID="CR9">2000</CitationRef> hierarchical exchange mechanisms for house allocation problems determine matchings as the outcome of multiple rounds of trading cycles. Any hierarchical exchange mechanism can be defined through a structure of ownership, which determines the ownership of houses after any round of...</citationref>

We consider non-cooperative environments in which two players have the power to gradually and unilaterally rule out some of their actions. Formally, we embed a strategic-form game into a multi-stage game, in which players can restrict their action spaces in all but the final stage, and select...

This short paper isolates a non-trivial class of games for which there exists a monotone relation between the size of pure strategy spaces and the number of pure Nash equilibria (Theorem). This class is that of two- player nice games, i.e., games with compact real intervals as strategy spaces...