Despite comprehensive reform (Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act) and recent review (Phillips Review in 2007) of party finance in Britain, public opinion of party finance remains plagued by perceptions of corruption, undue influence from wealthy donors, carefree and wasteful spending and, more generally, from the perception that there is just ‘too much money’ in politics. In this ...

odels of bilateral contracting, such as the canonical holdup model, typically assume that third parties are not available. Given this assumption, the equilibrium outcome is not first-best efficient if contracts can be renegotiated. To be more specific, suppose an architect and a builder must cooperate to build a building. The quality of the building will depend on three things: the quality of t...

In this paper I study the strategic implications of coalition formation in an assembly. A coalition forms a voting bloc to coordinate the voting behavior of its members, acting as a single player and affecting the policy outcome. In a game of endogenous coalition formation, I show that voting blocs form in equilibrium, and in an assembly with two parties I show how the incentives to join a bloc...

The allocation of risks among the contracting parties in a contract is an important decision affecting the project success. Some risks in a project are uncontrollable; these are imposed to a project by external factors. Since contracting parties can neither control nor affect the occurrence of such risks, their allocation to a party would be inequitable. Therefore the cost overrun related to un...

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