Working Papers

Congressional scholars regularly identify Speaker Joseph G. Cannon as the personification of centralized authority and partisan strength in the United States Congress. Portraits of Cannon as a tyrant, however, are almost always based on anecdotal…

Motivated by the U.S. Congress’s motion to recommit with instructions to report forthwith, a simple spatial model is analyzed to clarify the relationship between early-stage agenda-settings rights of a committee and/or the majority party, a late-…

This paper provides a theory of private politics in which an activist seeks to change the production practices of a firm for the purpose of redistribution to those whose interests it supports. The source of the activist’s influence is the…

Synder and Groseclose (2000) develop and apply an innovative method for detecting and estimating the frequency and magnitude of party influence in congressional roll call voting. This paper presents a framework for assessing to coefficient that…

An important, but largely unexplored, class of bargaining problems involve two negotiators, who send signals to a third party. Such problems are especially common in politics, where elected officials must worry about approval from voters and…

We survey modern models of delegation which assume that a boss and subordinate pursue their own goals. Among the major themes covered are the following: the conditions under which the boss will prefer to delegate versus those in which she will…

Because of a little noticed provision of the Federal Elections Campaign Act, slightly more than a third of the members of the 102nd House of Representatives were allowed to convert unspent campaign fund to personal use - but only if they left…

This paper presents a complete information model of competitive lobbying in a majority-rule institution where lobbying consists of support provided to legislators in the form of politically valuable resources. Two lobbyists alternate in…

This paper presents a finite-horizon, game-theoretic model of the dynamics of multidimensional collective choice and a set of analytical and computational results characterizing those dynamics. The focus is on continuing collective goods programs…

This paper presents theories of strategic nonmarket participation in majority rule and executive institutions and a set of principles of nonmarket strategy developed from those theories. The theories are based on models of vote recruitment in…

This paper presents a theory of parliamentary systems that incorporates electoral, government formation, and legislative institutions and focuses on the strategic opportunities inherent in those institutions. The electoral system is proportional…

This paper provides a model of integrated market and nonmarket strategies in the context of an industry facing regulatory legislation that differentially affects the firms in the industry. The legislation is chosen in a majority rule institution…

This paper describes behavior conventions that are stable long run outcomes of reinforcement behavior rules in two-person repeated games. Each player plays the repeated game with a fixed but endogenous aspiration, a payoff level that is…

This paper addresses the interplay of strategy, organization, and incentives in a global company. The basic framework takes one step further Chandler’s perspective that structure follows strategy by incorporating incentives chosen in response to…

This paper investigates the fit between strategy and structure for a decentralized global firm that may organize along product and geography dimensions. Organization serves two purposes. First, it provides for the management of spillovers across…

Formal theories of the internal organization of legislature have mainly focused on the United States Congress. While these models have been successful in showing why committee systems should emerge in Congress, they fail to explain the variance…

This paper presents a theory of the internal organization of a decentralized firm that operates along more than one dimension; e.g., a multiproduct firm that operates along more than one dimension; e.g. a multiproduct firm that operates in more…

This paper presents a theory of endogenous internal organization in a multiagent hierarchy characterized by incomplete information in which independent agents produce complements and have an opportunity to form an alliance through which they…

This paper studies contracting between a principal, a prime contractor, and a subcontractor when both the prime contractor and the subcontractor have private information about their own costs of producing complementary inputs. Side-contracting…

This paper models a dynamic sequence of protest activities as an informational cascade. Such a synthesis of participation and signaling games motivates why large numbers of people may have incentives to engage in costly collective action. The…