We analyze the relative importance of party ideology and rents from office in the formation of coalitions in a parliamentary democracy. In equilibrium, the types of coalitions that are formed may be minimal winning, minority or surplus and they may be ideologically `disconnected'. The coalitions...

The last decade has seen the burgeoning of several hundred local community currency institutions in cities across the world. Although residents of these communities claim that local currency promotes local development, how if at all it does so has hitherto been unexplored. This paper argues that...

We study a game theoretic model of a parliamentary democracy under proportional representation where `citizen candidates' form parties, voting occurs and governments are formed. We study the coalition governments that emerge as functions of the parties' seat shares, the size of the rents from...

Policymakers face time and resource constraints in investigating issues and formulating policies. How do these constraints a§ect information transmission by informed but biased interest groups? We study this question using a model in which interest groups lobby a policymaker by o§ering...

This paper studies the role of subpoena power in enabling policymakers to make better informed decisions. In particular, we take into account the effect of subpoena power on the information voluntarily supplied by interest groups as well as the information obtained by the policymaker via the...