When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be influenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses "populist' policies - i.e., policies to the left...

We study dynamic selection of governments under different political institutions, with a special focus on institutional "flexibility". A government consists of a subset of the individuals in the society. The competence level of the government in office determines collective utilities (e.g., by...

A central feature of dynamic collective decision-making is that the rules that govern the procedures for future decision-making and the distribution of political power across players are determined by current decisions. For example, current constitutional change must take into account how the...

We study the formation of a ruling coalition in political environments. Each individual is endowed with a level of political power. The ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of resources. A ruling coalition needs to contain enough...

We analyze persuasion in a model, in which each receiver might buy a direct access to the sender's signal or to rely on her network connections to get it. For the sender, a higher slant increases the impact per direct receiver, yet diminishes the willingness of agents to receive information....

We analyze persuasion in a model, in which each receiver (of many) might buy a direct access to the sender's signal or to rely on her network connections to get the same information. For the sender, a more biased signal increases the impact per subscriber (direct receiver), yet diminishes the...