Rhetoric in legislative bargaining with asymmetric information

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chen, Ying; Eraslan, Huelya
• 署名单位: Johns Hopkins University; University of Southampton
• 刊物名称: THEORETICAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1933-6837
• DOI: 10.3982/TE821
• 发表日期: 2014-05-01
• 页码: 483-513
• 关键词: Legislative bargaining; rhetoric; cheap talk; private information; bundling

摘要

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. We show that it is not possible for all legislators to communicate informatively. In particular, the legislator who is ideologically more distant from the proposer cannot communicate informatively, but the closer legislator may communicate whether he would compromise or fight on ideology. Surprisingly, the proposer may be worse off when bargaining with two legislators (under majority rule) than with one (who has veto power), because competition between the legislators may result in less information conveyed in equilibrium. Despite separable preferences, the proposer is always better off making proposals for the two dimensions together.