This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient...

Two players choose whether to coordinate on a project. Each of them is endowed with some information, and if both possess a sufficient amount then coordination is profitable. In order to facilitate coordination the players reveal information to one another. However, some players are concerned...

We compare centralized and decentralized policy making in a federation in which policy heterogeneity is inherently costly and preferences vary across jurisdictions: all jurisdictions agree that some harmonization is desirable but no one agree on the direction of harmonization. This type of...