Browsing by Author "Evdokimov, Kirill"

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    Essays on legislative and multilateral bargaining
    (2022-04-21) Evdokimov, Kirill; Eraslan, Hulya; Morgan, T. Clifton
    In this dissertation, I present a game-theoretic analysis of three models of collective decision-making, with a particular focus on the effects of decision-making institutions on the produced outcomes. In Chapter 1, I study a model of bargaining in which an agenda-setter proposes a spatial policy to voters and can revise the initial proposal if it gets rejected. Voters can communicate with each other and have distinct but correlated preferences, which the agenda-setter is uncertain about. I investigate whether the ability to make a revised proposal is valuable to the agenda-setter. When a single acceptance is required to pass a policy, the equilibrium outcome is unique and has a screening structure. Because the preferences of voters are single-peaked, the Coase conjecture is violated and the ability to make a revised proposal is valuable. When two or more acceptances are required to pass a policy, there is an interval of the agenda-setter's equilibrium expected payoffs. The endpoints have a screening structure, leading to the same conclusions as in the case of a single acceptance. Interestingly, an increase in the required quota may allow the agenda-setter to extract more surplus from voters. In Chapter 2, I analyze a distributive model of legislative bargaining in which the surpluses generated by coalitions equal the sums of productivities of coalition members. The heterogeneous ability of players to generate surplus leads to asymmetric bargaining prospects in otherwise symmetric environments. More productive players are recruited more often by other players despite having higher expected payoffs; however, the players who are recruited in every coalition have equal expected payoffs despite having different productivity. I show that an increase in the required quota raises equality as measured by the Gini coefficient. In Chapter 3, I provide a sufficient condition for the uniqueness of equilibrium payoffs in a model of stochastic bargaining with unanimity rule and risk-averse players.