Transaction Costs and Coalition Stability under Majority Rule

Government program allocations are more stable and more equally shared than theory predicts. Although various explanations have been offered, we emphasize the high transaction costs of political negotiations and coalition enforcement. Cycling predictions ignore the cost to politicians of repeatedly forming coalitions and neglect the opportunity costs of failed coalitions and the loss of related government programs that bring valuable constituent benefits. Because of these costs, Congress relies on coalitions larger than the minimum necessary to enact a program, adopts relatively egalitarian programmatic sharing rules, and resists efforts to change those allocations. To illustrate we analyze the Federal Highway Trust Fund.     

Representation of effectivity functions in coalition proof Nash equilibrium: A complete characterization

The concept of coalition proof Nash equilibrium was introduced by Bernheim et al. [5]. In the present paper, we consider the representation problem for coalition proof Nash equilibrium: For a given effectivity function, describing the power structure or the system of rights of coalitions in society, it is investigated whether there is a game form which gives rise to this effectivity function and which is such that for any preference assignment, there is a coalition proof Nash equilibrium.  It is shown that the effectivity functions which can be represented in coalition proof Nash equilibrium are exactly those which satisfy the well-known properties of maximality and superadditivity. As a corollary of the result, we obtain necessary conditions for implementation of a social choice correspondence in coalition proof Nash equilibrium which can be formulated in terms of the associated effectivity function. Received: 24 June 1999/Accepted: 20 September 2000     

Political equilibria with electoral uncertainty

After an election, when party positions and strengths are known, there may be a centrally located large party at the core position. Theory suggests that such a core party is able to form a minority government and control policy. In the absence of a core party, theory suggests that the outcome be a lottery associated with coalition risk. Stochastic models of elections typically indicate that all parties, in equilibrium, will adopt positions at the electoral center. This paper first presents an existence theorem for local Nash equilibrium (LNE) under vote maximization, and then constructs a more general model using the notion of coalition risk. The model allows for the balancing of office and policy motivations. Empirical analyses of elections in the Netherlands and Israel are used as illustrations of the model and of the concept of a structurally stable LNE. The figures and tables are reproduced from Schofield and Sened (2006) with permission from Cambridge University Press.     

Generalized average rules as stable Nash mechanisms to implement generalized median rules

We consider a problem in which a policy is chosen from a one-dimensional set over which voters have single-peaked preferences. While Moulin (Public Choice 35:437–455, 1980) and others subsequent works have focused on strategy-proof rules, Renault and Trannoy (Mimeo 2011) and Renault and Trannoy (J Pub Econ Theory 7:169–199, 2005) have shown that the average rule implements a generalized median rule in Nash equilibria and provide an interpretation of the parameters in Moulin’s rule. In this article, we first extend their result by showing that a wide range of voting rules which includes the average rule can implement Moulin’s rule in Nash equilibria. Moreover, we show additionally that within this class, generalized average rules are Cournot stable. That is, from any strategy profile, any best response path must converge to a Nash equilibrium.     

Agenda control in coalition formation

Theoretical models of government formation in political science usually assume that the head of state is non-strategic. In this paper, we analyze the power of an agenda setter who chooses the order in which players are recognized to form coalitions in simple games. We characterize those sets of players which can be imposed in the equilibrium coalition and show that the only decisive structures where the agenda setter can impose the presence of any minimal winning coalition are apex games, where a large player forms a winning coalition with any of the small players. Keywords: Government Formation, Agenda Control, Coalitional Bargaining, Finite Bargaining Rules. Received: 26 January 2001/Accepted: 31 July 2001     

Polarization, Information Collection and Electoral Control

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect information. Voting rules that focus on the opposition party sometimes dominate voting rules that focus on the incumbent party. When parties are policy motivated, they also have to be motivated to select good policies. Generally, it is easier to stimulate policy motivated parties than office motivated parties to collect information. However, in contrast to office motivated parties, policy motivated parties will sometimes select policies that conflict with the representative voter’s interest.     

THE ATTACK‐AND‐DEFENSE GROUP CONTESTS: BEST SHOT VERSUS WEAKEST LINK

This study analyzes a group contest in which one group (defenders) follows a weakest link, whereas the other group (attackers) follows a best shot impact function (IF). We fully characterize the Nash and coalition‐proof equilibria and show that with symmetric valuation the coalition‐proof equilibrium is unique up to the permutation of the identity of the active player in the attacker group. With asymmetric valuation, it is always an equilibrium for one of the highest valuation players to be active; it may also be the case that the highest valuation players in the attacker group free‐ride completely on a group member with a lower valuation. However, in any equilibrium, only one player in the attacker group is active, whereas all the players in the defender group are active and exert the same effort. We also characterize the Nash and coalition‐proof equilibria for the case in which one group follows either a best shot or a weakest link but the other group follows an additive IF. (JEL C72, D70, D72, D74, H41)     

Configuration to conviction: Network structures of political judiciary in the Austrian Corporate State

In this paper, we analyze the extent of political judiciary in the transformed system of the Corporate State of Austria using the computational methods of a network approach. We investigate the differences in the legal prosecution of the political opposition, namely of members of the Communist, Social Democratic and National Socialist parties based on Vienna as a case study. Based on over 1,800 court records from 1935 processed at the Viennese provincial courts, we evaluate the courts’ practice in contrast to the official legislature during the consolidated phase of the regime. In this study, we examine whether the law was strategically utilized against specific groups (following the concept of Kirchheimer (1965)’s political lawsuit), and as in the more lenient version of Fraenkel (1927/1968)’s tendency justice, we analyze whether the law was disadvantageously interpreted for political partisanship up to a blatant breach of conduct. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods with network science approaches, we identify patterns of political prosecution and structural predispositions for the sentencing of left- and right-wing groups of the political opposition. We can prove different practices of political judiciary and differentiate between the different treatment of Social Democrats, Communists and National Socialists in 1935 in Vienna. We identify specialized strategies to prosecute the political opposition, resulting in a clear bias against left-wing groups and a relative leniency in the conviction of National Socialists based on the evolution of charges in the courts’ actions. Using a multimodal network approach, we reveal key players and cooperation of judges and prosecutors which accounted for harsher sentences. We provide evidence that the system of control over the judiciary and over the political opposition was already crumbling in the Austrian capital in 1935, even before the “Anschluss” to NS-Germany in 1938.     

Der Einfluss politischer Ereignisse auf die PopularitÄt von Parteien und Politikern und auf das Parteiensystem

Political events, entering the political system as external shocks, can have a sizable impact on the popularity of political parties and politicians. We investigate this impact using as examples the unregistered campaign donations to chancellor Kohl (CDU-Spendenaffäre) and the political handling of the flash flood in the Elbe region shortly before the last federal election. Our special contribution to the literature is the combined analysis of event impacts on the valence dimension of the German party system and the inertia of the ideological dimension. By using a principal component analysis we extract a two-dimensional political configuration containing the position of parties and politicians and voters’ ideal points. We show that the basic ideological structure of the party system remains nearly unaltered even by such prominent events as the Spendenaffäre (donations scandal). The main changes affect the valence dimension. Focusing on voters we show that the greatest change of evaluation of parties takes place within the group of independents while the partisans remain rather stable in their assessments.     

Games with capacity manipulation: incentives and Nash equilibria

Studying the interactions between preference and capacity manipulation in matching markets, we prove that acyclicity is a necessary and sufficient condition that guarantees the stability of a Nash equilibrium and the strategy-proofness of truthful capacity revelation under the hospital-optimal and intern-optimal stable rules. We then introduce generalized games of manipulation in which hospitals move first and state their capacities, and interns are subsequently assigned to hospitals using a sequential mechanism. In this setting, we first consider stable revelation mechanisms and introduce conditions guaranteeing the stability of the outcome. Next, we prove that every stable non-revelation mechanism leads to unstable allocations, unless restrictions on the preferences of the agents are introduced.     

The structural organization and micropolitics of everyday secret telling interactions

The interactions that typically precede and follow explicit secrets display a structural organization of sequentially ordered items that form the vehicle for micropolitical processes of reality construction, selectivity and coalition making. Our data showed a preference for secret receivers to accept the frame, construction, political formulation, bonding, and coalitions of explicit secrets. The teller can define information as exclusive, select the secret recipient, specify the exclusivity rules, and infuse the information with political vectors. After the secret is told the power shifts to the receiver who can then sanction the teller for divulging a confidence, and/or choose to break the explicit and implicit rules and alliance of the preference system that organizes secret telling.     

Farsighted stability in hedonic games

We investigate how rational individuals partition themselves into different coalitions in hedonic games (see Banerjee et al. 2001 and Bogomolnaia and Jackson 2002), where individuals' preferences depend solely on the composition of the coalition they belong to. Given that the four solution concepts studied in the literature (core, Nash stability, individual stability and contractual individual stability) may exhibit myopia on the part of the players, we amend these notions by endowing players with foresight in that they look many steps ahead and consider only credible outcomes. We study the properties of the farsighted stability solutions; in particular, we show that when preferences are strict, coalition structures in the core are farsighted stable and a similar result also holds for Nash stability but not for individual stability and contractual individual stability. We thank Birgit Grodal, Hideo Konishi, an associate editor and two referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also go to the audiences at University of Copenhagen, CSAET, 2001, Workshop on Coalitions and Networks at Warwick, 2001, and International Game Theory Conference at Stony Brook, 2001.     

Games of capacity allocation in many-to-one matching with an aftermarket

In this paper, we study many-to-one matching (hospital–intern markets) with an aftermarket. We first show that every stable matching system is manipulable via aftermarket. We then analyze the Nash equilibria of capacity allocation games, in which preferences of hospitals and interns are common knowledge and every hospital determines a quota for the regular market given its total capacity for the two matching periods. Under the intern-optimal stable matching system, we show that a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium may not exist. Common preferences for hospitals ensure the existence of equilibrium in weakly dominant strategies whereas unlike in games of capacity manipulation strong monotonicity of population is not a sufficient restriction on preferences to avoid the non-existence problem. Besides, in games of capacity allocation, it is not true either that every hospital weakly prefers a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium to any larger regular market quota profiles.     

Double implementation of Lindahl allocations by a pure mechanism

This paper considers the issue of designing mechanisms whose Nash allocations and strong Nash allocations coincide with Lindahl allocations for public goods economies when coalition patterns, preferences, and endowments are unknown to the designer. It will be noted that the mechanism presented here is feasible and continuous, and the implementation result is obtained without defining an artificial preference profile on prices announced by individuals. In addition, unlike most existing Nash-implementing mechanisms which need to distinguish the case of two agents from that of three or more agents, this paper provides a unified mechanism which is irrespective of the number of agents. Received: 19 August 1997/Accepted: 16 November 1998     

Games implementing the stable rule of marriage problems in strong Nash equilibria

In a marriage problem, we introduce a condition called “exclusive matchability (EM)”: the condition mainly says that each pair of a man and a woman can choose to be a matching pair regardless of others' actions. This condition is essential to strong Nash implementation of the stable rule. We show that any mechanism which satisfies exclusive matchability implements the stable rule in strong Nash equilibria. Received: 17 May 1999/Accepted: 30 August 2001 I would like to thank anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged.     

Campaigning in the fourth age of political communication. A multi-method study on the use of Facebook by German and Austrian parties in the 2013 national election campaigns

Starting from the contribution to the discussion on a fourth age of political communication, here we argue that, as a consequence of how the Web 2.0 has changed political campaigns, the theoretical time-bound three-phase models of political campaigning must be reconsidered. We propose four ideal campaign types based on their ideal-typical target audience: partisan-, mass-, target group- and individual-centered campaigns. In reality, each campaign combines elements of all types. To examine this mixture empirically, we apply a most similar systems design and investigate five German and six Austrian parties’ use of Facebook in the 2013 national election campaigns. On the basis of face-to-face interviews with the campaign managers and a quantitative content analysis of the respective parties’ Facebook pages, we analyze how parties used Facebook as a campaigning tool to inform, interact with, and mobilize voters, as well as which target audiences they addressed. We find that, although the campaign managers declare Facebook their most important Web 2.0 campaigning tool, the German and Austrian parties did not make use of Facebook’s interactive and mobilizing potential, rather relying on mass-centered information, possibly due to the framework conditions in both countries. Based on our findings, we conclude that the role of context for election campaigning should be discussed more carefully.     

NETWORK STRUCTURE IN A LINK FORMATION GAME: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

In this article, we use an experiment to evaluate the performance of alternative refinements in a Myersonian link formation game with a supermodular payoff function. Our results show that a non‐cooperative refinement, the global games (GG) approach, outperforms alternative cooperative refinements (strong Nash equilibrium, coalition‐proof Nash equilibrium, and pairwise stable Nash equilibrium) in explaining the observed experimental behavior in the static game of complete information with three players. The results are robust to some comparative statics and the GG approach shows a high predictive power under incomplete information. However, under repeated interaction or with a greater number of players, the GG approach loses predictive power, but so do the cooperative refinements. The results illustrate the importance of coordination failure in practice and the need to design mechanisms to reduce this effect in practical decision‐making problems. (JEL C70, C92, D20, D44, D82)     

Kingmakers and leaders in coalition formation

Assume that players strictly rank each other as coalition partners. We propose a procedure whereby they “fall back” on their preferences, yielding internally compatible, or coherent, majority coalition(s), which we call fallback coalitions. If there is more than one fallback coalition, the players common to them, or kingmakers, determine which fallback coalition will form. The first player(s) acceptable to all other members of a fallback coalition are the leader(s) of that coalition. The effects of different preference assumptions—particularly, different kinds of single-peakedness—on the number of coherent coalitions, their connectedness, and which players become kingmakers and leaders are investigated. The fallback procedure may be used (i) empirically to identify kingmakers and leaders or (ii) normatively to select them. We illustrate the model using data from the U.S. Supreme Court, 2005–2009.     

A new model of coalition formation

In this paper, a new model of multidimensional coalition formation in politics is presented. The model provides an opportunity to analyze a number of different kinds of issues at the same time. A policy space consists of a finite number of independent sub-spaces (policy spaces on certain issues), which can be multidimensional. Any policy sub-space on a certain sub-issue can be either a Euclidean space or (in principle) any other type of set. So, it is possible to include issues which cannot be represented by a Euclidean space or a fixed sum. A government is defined as a pair consisting of a majority coalition and a policy supported by this coalition. The majority coalition may be not minimal winning. Each party is allowed to give one qualification to a policy on a certain issue and to a majority coalition: desirable of a certain degree, acceptable, or unacceptable. By representing party preferences the way we do, we can include both rent-seeking and idealistic motivations in one consistent model. We define the value of a policy/coalition/government to a party, and the notions of a feasible and stable policy/coalition/government. The model uses party preferences in order to predict government policy. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a stable government are investigated. Moreover, some alternative definitions of a stable government are introduced, and relations between these definitions and the chosen definition of a stable government are established.For Agnieszka Rusinowska the research for this paper was done during a stay as a Marie Curie fellow at Tilburg University, Department of Philosophy.     

A necessary and sufficient condition for stable matching rules to be strategy-proof

We study one-to-one matching problems and analyze conditions on preference domains that admit the existence of stable and strategy-proof rules. In this context, when a preference domain is unrestricted, it is known that no stable rule is strategy-proof. We introduce the notion of the no-detour condition, and show that under this condition, there is a stable and group strategy-proof rule. In addition, we show that when the men’s preference domain is unrestricted, the no-detour condition is also a necessary condition for the existence of stable and strategy-proof rules. As a result, under the assumption that the men’s preference domain is unrestricted, the following three statements are equivalent: (i) a preference domain satisfies the no-detour condition, (ii) there is a stable and group strategy-proof rule, (iii) there is a stable and strategy-proof rule.