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...

The study of policy discourse comprises actor-centered and content-oriented approaches. We attempt to close the gap between the two kinds of approaches by introducing a new methodology for the analysis of political discourse called Discourse Network Analysis. It is based on social network...

Information exchange in policy networks is usually attributed to preference similarity, influence reputation, social trust and institutional actor roles. We suggest that political opportunity structures and transaction costs play another crucial role and estimate a rich statistical network model...

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...

We consider non-cooperative environments in which two players have the power to commit but cannot sign binding agreements. We show that by committing to a set of actions rather than to a single action, players can implement a wide range of action profiles. We give a complete characterization of...

We consider non-cooperative environments in which two players have the power to commit but cannot sign binding agreements. We show that by committing to a set of actions rather than to a single action, players can implement a wide range of action profiles. We give a complete characterization of...

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...