A Simple New Model of Some Garbage Can Processes

Bendor, Moe and Shotts (2001) argued that it is possible to revitalize the GCT. Here we present one such attempt to capture some major aspects of garbage can processes that were stipulated by the original verbal theory. Our model focuses especially on problematic preferences. We consider an institution headed by a committee of three decision makers. Each person has an ideal policy in a two-dimensional policy space and preferences are spatial, in the sense used by political scientists: the farther a policy is from person i’s ideal point, the less she likes it. Hence, indifference curves in this two-dimensional space are circles. The decision makers’ ideal points are equidistant from the center of the policy space, which is normalized to (0,0).