Issue by issue legislative bargaining (joint with Monica A. Giovanniello and Clara Ponsatí).

In this paper, we study the disjunctive facing the members of a committee with risk-averse agents when deciding between conducting negotiations issue-by-issue or by bundling issues. While in unanimity regimes bundling issues is preferred when agents are sufficiently patient, we show that under simple majority, the inherent risk of being excluded from a winning coalition makes issue-by-issue the preferred regime as far as the inefficiencies generated by the impossibility of inter-issue compensation are not too high. 

Buying from the fringe (too) (joint with Lluís Bru and József Sákovics)

We analyze how to divide the requirements of a (public) firm into lots, when potential suppliers suffer from heterogeneous diseconomies of scale. The optimal design leads to all firms, included the disadvantaged competitors, the fringe, being active, despite the concomitant cost of increasing supplier profit. Setting large lots that only large firms can produce competitively is necessary; but also setting small lots that the fringe firms can competitively bid for, reduces procurement cost. If, in addition, some medium-sized lots are set aside for the fringe –as allowed by the US regulations, but not by the EU ones –procurement cost is further reduced

Two-level lobbying and policy gridlock (joint with Jenny C. de Freitas and Antoni Rubí Barceló). Submitted

In this study, we model a two-stage contest to examine the strategic behavior of two opposing interest groups who may influence a public policy at two different stages, say the formulation of an alternative to the status quo and the approval stage. We characterize the equilibria and study the interest groups's incentives to invest in one stage or the other. We examine the circumstances under which the status quo is never replaced.

Contests with endogenous claims: Conflict dissipation  (joint with Marc Claveria-Mayol and Clara Ponsatí).  Accepted in Economics Letters.

We examine a one-dimensional policy contest between two agents that takes place in two steps: first, agents choose policy proposals; then, they engage in a Tullock contest in which one of the proposals prevails. We show that there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium (in undominated strategies), in which both contestants moderate their claims equally. When the contest is sufficiently competitive, proposals converge to the center, and conflict dissipates. Expected payoffs increase with the degree of competitiveness (up to an upper bound), while aggregate effort increases to a maximum and then decreases.