Jan Zapal

To enact a policy, a leader needs votes from q committee members with heterogeneous opposition intensities. She sequentially offers transfers in exchange for votes. The transfers are either promises paid only if the policy passes or paid up front. With transfer promises, the policy passes in equilibrium when the leader's gain from the policy is larger than the sum of the losses of the q members least opposed to the policy. Under non-unanimity rule, if the members are patient enough, the payments are close to zero when the policy passes. Whenever the policy passes in equilibrium with transfer promises, it also passes with up-front payments, at a cost close to zero. Moreover, there are scenarios when the policy passes with up-front payments, but not with transfer promises. Hence the leader is better off and the members are worse off with up-front payments than with transfer promises. The leader does not necessarily buy the votes of those least opposed. The opposition structure most challenging to the leader involves homogeneous committees. Our results provide an explanation for several empirical regularities.

final version prior to publication

further results in CERGE-EI WP 692

This article surveys the theoretical literature on legislative bargaining with endogenous status-quo. These are the legislative bargaining situations in which in each period a new policy is decided and the policy implemented in the event of no agreement is endogenously determined by the outcome of bargaining in the previous period. After describing a general framework, we discuss bargaining over redistributive policies, bargaining over spatial policies, existence issues, efficiency issues, and open questions.

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longer ISER WP 1090

We characterise optimal contracts in a dynamic principal-agent model of joint production in which project opportunities are heterogenous, utility from these projects is non-transferable and the agent has the option to quit the relationship at any time. In order to demand the production of projects that benefit her but not the agent, the principal must commit to produce projects that benefit the agent in the future. Production at all stages of the relationship is ordered by projects' cost-effectiveness, which is their efficiency in transferring utility between the principal and the agent: cost-effective demands impose relatively low costs on the agent, and cost-effective compensation imposes relatively low costs on the principal. Over time, optimal contracts become more generous towards the agent by adding commitments to less cost-effective compensation. In turn, because this new compensation cannot be profitably exchanged against less cost-effective demands, the principal narrows the scope of her demands.

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The paper proves, by construction, the existence of Markovian equilibria in a dynamic spatial legislative bargaining model. Players bargain over policies in an infinite horizon. In each period, a sequential protocol of proposal-making and voting, with random proposer recognitions and a simple majority, produces a policy that becomes the next period's status-quo; the status-quo is endogenous. The construction relies on simple strategies determined by strategic bliss points computed by the algorithm we provide. A strategic bliss point, the dynamic utility ideal, is a moderate policy relative to a bliss point, the static utility ideal. Moderation is strategic and germane to the dynamic environment; players moderate in order to constrain the future proposals of opponents. Moderation is a strategic substitute; when a player's opponents do moderate, she does not, and when they do not moderate, she does. We provide conditions under which the simple strategies induced by the strategic bliss points computed by the algorithm deliver a Stationary Markov Perfect equilibrium, and we prove its existence in generic games with impatient players and in symmetric games. Because the algorithm constructs all equilibria in simple strategies, we provide their general characterization, and we show their generic uniqueness.

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The paper shows that Corollary 10.3 in Muthoo's book Bargaining Theory with Applications (Cambridge University Press, 1999) is incorrect and proves that patience increases a player's equilibrium share in repeated bargaining situations. It clarifies why a tempting strategy of proof---replacing terms of an expression by approximations with identical limits, then doing comparative statics or taking limits---is flawed and will yield wrong conclusions in other contexts as well.

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How does political polarization affect the welfare of the electorate? We analyze this question using a framework in which two policy and office motivated parties compete in an infinite sequence of elections. We propose two novel measures to describe the degree of conflict among agents: antagonism is the disagreement between parties; extremism is the disagreement between each party and the representative voter. These two measures do not coincide when parties care about multiple issues. We show that forward-looking parties have an incentive to implement policies favored by the representative voter, in an attempt to constrain future challengers. This incentive grows as antagonism increases. On the other hand, extremism decreases the electorate's welfare. We discuss the methodological and empirical implications for the existing measures of political actors' ideal points and for the debate on elite polarization.

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The paper analyzes the problem of a committee chair using favors at her disposal to maximize the likelihood that her proposal gains committee support. The favors increase the probability of a given member approving the chair's proposal via a smooth voting function. The decision-making protocol is any quota voting rule. The paper characterizes the optimal allocation of any given level of favors and the optimal expenditure-minimizing level of favors. The optimal allocation divides favors uniformly among a coalition of the committee members. At a low level of favors, the coalition comprises all committee members. At a high level, it is the minimum winning coalition. The optimal expenditure level guarantees the chair certain support of the minimum winning coalition if favors are abundant and uncertain support of all committee members if favors are scarce; elitist or egalitarian committees are compatible with a strategic chair. The results are robust to changing the chair's objectives and to alternative voting functions, and reconcile theoretical predictions with empirical observations about legislative bargaining experiments, lobby vote buying and executive lawmaking.

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Which budgetary institutions result in efficient provision of public goods? We analyze a model with two parties bargaining over the allocation to a public good each period. Parties place different values on the public good, and these values may change over time. We focus on budgetary institutions that determine the rules governing feasible allocations to mandatory and discretionary spending programs. Mandatory spending is enacted by law and remains in effect until changed, and thus induces an endogenous status quo, whereas discretionary spending is a periodic appropriation that is not allocated if no new agreement is reached. We show that discretionary only and mandatory only institutions typically lead to dynamic inefficiency and that mandatory only institutions can even lead to static inefficiency. By introducing appropriate flexibility in mandatory programs, we obtain static and dynamic efficiency. This flexibility is provided by an endogenous choice of mandatory and discretionary programs, sunset provisions and state-contingent mandatory programs in increasingly complex environments.

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further results in NBER WP 22457

We investigate the implications of imperfect best response---in combination with different assumptions about correct (QRE) or incorrect beliefs (Quantal-Gambler's Fallacy or QGF)---in the alternating offer multilateral bargaining game. We prove that a QRE of this game exists and characterize the unique solution to the proposer's problem---that is, the proposal observed most frequently in a QRE. We structurally estimate this model on data from laboratory experiments, and show that it explains behavior better than the model with perfect best response: receivers vote probabilistically; proposers allocate resources mostly within a minimum winning coalition of legislators but do not fully exploit their bargaining power. Incorporating history-dependent beliefs about the future distribution of proposal power into the QRE model (QGF) leads to an even better match with the data, as this model implies slightly lower shares to the proposer, maintaining similar or higher frequencies of minimum winning coalitions and similar voting behavior.

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supplementary material

The paper proves, by construction, the existence of Markovian equilibria in a dynamic spatial legislative bargaining model. Three players bargain over one-dimensional policies in an infinite horizon. In each period, a sequential protocol of proposal-making and voting, with random proposer recognitions and a simple majority, produces a policy that becomes the next period's status-quo. An equilibrium exists for any profile of proposer recognition probabilities, any profile of players' ideal policies, and any discount factor. In equilibrium, policies converge to the median's ideal policy, players moderate and propose policies close to the median's ideal in an attempt to constraint future proposers, but the tendency to moderate is a strategic substitute as the opponent of a moderating player does not moderate.

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The paper examines the ability of several alternative group decision-making models to generate proposing, voting and decision patterns matching those observed in the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee and the US Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee. A decision-making procedure, common to all the models, is to vote between adoption of the chairman's proposal and retention of the status-quo policy, with heterogeneous votes generated by private information of the models' monetary policy committee members. The members can additionally express reservations regarding the final committee decision. The three alternative models differ in the degree of informational influence between the chairman and the remaining members. We find that a 'supermajoritarian' model, in which the chairman proposes a policy she knows would be accepted by a supermajority of the committee members, combined with allowance for reservations, closely replicates real-world decision-making patterns. The model predicts no rejections of chairman's proposals, low but non-trivial dissent, even during meetings where the chairman proposes no change in policy, and predictive power of the voting record of the whole committee regarding future monetary policy changes.

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We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy using data on five inflation-targeting countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). We find that in all countries the voting records, namely the difference between the average voted-for and actually implemented policy rate, signal future monetary policy, making a case for publishing the records. This result holds even if we control for the financial market expectations, include the voting records from the period covering the current global financial crisis, and examine the differences in timing and style of the voting record announcements.

We follow recent Optimum Currency Area empirical literature and investigate the correlation of supply and demand shocks between the individual new EU member countries and the 'EU-core'. Treating the whole economy as one sector this is a standard exercise based on Mundell's original insight that monetary unification can be welfare improving if (among other things) two or more countries contemplating unification face similar economic disturbances. However, treating the economy of each country as a single sector precludes gaining further insights from the empirical exercise. For this purpose, we propose a novel methodology which treats the economy of each country as a collection of three distinct sectors. This allows us to go beyond the standard results usually presented in the form of international correlation of supply and demand shocks. The methodology combines two pieces of information about each sector in a given economy. The first is the international correlation of sector-specific supply and demand shocks. This information is valuable in itself from the economic policy perspective, as it identifies the most and least internationally synchronized sectors, that is, the sectors that are most and least likely to benefit from monetary unification. The second piece of information is the sector-specific weights used for aggregation across sectors in a given country. While interesting in itself, when combined with the first this piece of information points to sectors that are more and less responsible for the final result one obtains from the empirical exercise. The international correlation of supply and demand shocks is a result common to the standard methodology and our methodology, so the latter can also be seen as a robustness check of the former.