Separated powers cannot permanently constrain individual ambitions. Concerns about a government's ability to respond to contemporary and future crises, we show, invariably compromise the principled commitments one branch of government has in limiting the authority of another. We study a dynamic...

This paper adopts a "revealed preference" approach to the question of what can be inferred about bias in a political system. We model an infinite horizon, dynamic economy and its political system from the point of view of an "outside observer." The observer sees a finite sequence of policy data,...

This paper examines the mechanics of intertemporal information provision in dynastic governments. It has been suggested that "horizontal accountability," i.e., a system of governance where auditing functions lie outside the executive branch, can ensure credible disclosure of information. The...

Competition between political parties is a process that unfolds over time whereas formal theories of party competition have tended to take an essentially static, or one-shot, approach. This leaves some gaps in our understanding of the dynamics of campaigning. The aim of this paper is to make up...

We revisit the pros and cons of cartel criminalization with focus on its possible introduction in the EU. We document a recent phenomenon that we name EU ``leniency inflation", whereby leniency has been increasingly awarded to many, and sometimes all members of a cartel. We argue that, coupled...

Modern antitrust engenders a possible conflict between public and private enforcement due to the central role of Leniency Programs. Damage actions may reduce the attractiveness of Leniency Programs for cartel participants if their cooperation with the competition authority increases the chance...

Dynamic decision-making without commitment is usually modelled as a game between the current and future selves of the decision maker. It has been observed that if the time-horizon is infinite, then such games may have multiple subgame-perfect equilibrium solutions. We provide a sufficient...

Unique-lowest sealed-bid auctions are auctions in which participation is endogenous and the winning bid is the lowest bid among all unique bids. Such auctions admit very many Nash equilibria (NEs) in pure and mixed strategies. The two-bidders' auction is similar to the Hawk-Dove game, which...

Outcomes of the shallow lake interest conflict are presented in a number of different contexts: quasi-static and dynamic social planning, and quasi-static one-shot and repeated non-cooperative play. As the underlying dynamics are non-convex, the analysis uses geometrical-numerical methods: the...

Epstein (1998) demonstrates that in the demographic Prisoner's Dilemma game it is possible to sustain cooperation in a repeated game played on a finite grid, where agents are spatially distributed and of fixed strategy type ('cooperate' or 'defect'). We introduce a methodology to formalize the...