In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters’ choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician’s optimal experiment. With a non-unanimous voting rule, she exploits voters’ heterogeneity by designing an experiment with realizations targeting different winning coalitions. Consequently, under a simple...

Topological effects produce chaos in multiagent simulation and distributed computation. We explain this result by developing three themes concerning complex systems in the natural and social sciences: (i) Pragmatically, a system is complex when it is represented efficiently by different models at different scales. (ii) Nontrivial topology, identifiable as we scale towards the global, induces co...

We present an axiomatic characterization of the Owen-Shapley spatial power index for the case where issues are elements of two-dimensional space. This characterization employs a version of the transfer condition, which enables us to unravel a spatial game into spatial games connected to unanimity games. The other axioms are spatial versions of anonymity and dummy, and two conditions concerned p...

We provide a unified analysis of the canonical rational voting model with privately known political preferences and costs of voting. Focusing on type-symmetric equilibrium, we show that for small electorates, members of the minority group vote with a strictly higher probability than do those in the majority, but the majority is strictly more likely to win the election. As the electorate size gr...

Government ownership of banks is very common in countries other than the United States. This paper provides cross-country, bank-level empirical evidence about political influences on these banks. It shows that government-owned banks increase their lending in election years relative to private banks. This effect is robust to controlling for country-specific macroeconomic and institutional factor...

The privatization process in Eastern Europe is not irreversible. Future governments may want to (partially) expropriate successul private rms in order to subsidize unsuccessful ones. We use a simple median voter model to predict the policy of future governments. It is shown that there will be less expropriation the more shares were distributed for free to the population. Diversi ed mass privati...

The Expansion of Higher Education and Time-Consistent Taxation This paper analyzes educational choices and political support for subsidies to higher education in the presence of a time-consistency problem in income redistribution. There may be political support for so generous subsidization that it motivates the median voter to obtain higher education. As a result of increasing own income, the ...

We present a model where special interest groups condition contributions on the receiving candidate’s support and also her opponent’s. This allows interest groups to obtain support from contributions as well as from threats of contributing. Out-of-equilibrium contributions help explain the missing money puzzle. Our framework contradicts standard models in predicting that interest groups give to...

I analyze the effect of a sequential election system when the first voter has private information using a simple two candidate, two voter model in which the second voter is decisive. Both voters observe the candidates’ policy positions, but only the first voter observes which candidate is competent. I show that in equilibrium the candidates pander to the policy preferences of the first voter. D...

Lotteries vs. All-Pay Auctions in Fair and Biased Contests The form of contests for a single fixed prize can be determined by a designer who maximizes the contestants’ efforts. This paper establishes that, under common knowledge of the two asymmetric contestants’ prize valuations, a fair Tullock-type endogenously determined lottery is always superior to an all-pay-auction; it yields larger expe...