Party activists wish to (i) advocate the best policy and yet (ii) unify behind a common party line. An activist`s understanding of his environment is based on the speeches of party leaders. A leader`s influence, measured by the weight placed on her speech, increases with her judgement on policy...

Empirical evidence suggests that a Prime Minister can benefit from firing ministers who are involved in political scandals. We explore a model in which a minister`s exposure to scandals is positvely related to his policy activism, so that a Prime Minister may wish to protect him from resignation...

Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass (a barrier to coordination) must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of the alternatives respond to the underlying mood of the party. An individual`s...

Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass (a barrier tocoordination) must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is tosucceed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of thealternatives respond to the underlying mood of the party. An...

Party activists wish to (i) advocate the best policy and yet (ii) unify behind a commonparty line. An activist's understanding of his environment is based on the speeches ofparty leaders. A leader's influence, measured by the weight placed on her speech,increases with her judgement on policy...

Simple plurality election systems (commonly known as `First-Past-The-Post`) are often associated with the dominance of two political parties. Such systems tend to reward leading parties with too many seats (known as the `mechanical` effect) and provoke tactical voting, where voters switch away...

Collective action problems arise in a variety of situations. The economic theory of public good provision raises a number of important questions. Who contributes to the public good, and who free rides? How might a social planner exploit the interdependence of decision-making to encourage...

The volunteer`s dilemma is an asymmetric n-player binary-action game in which a public good is provided if and only if at least one player volunteers, and consequently bears some private cost. So long as the value generated for every player exceeds this private cost there are n pure-strategy...

We present a general Cournot model in which each firm may sell multiple quality-differentiated products. We use an upgrades approach, working not with the actual products, but instead with upgrades from one quality to the next. The properties of single-product Cournot models carry over to the...

In an asymmetric war of attrition the players` prize valuations are drawn from different distributions. A stochastic strength ordering, based upon relative hazard rates, is used to rank these distributions. The stochastically stronger player is perceived to be strong ex ante, even though her...