Open AccessRhetoric in legislative bargaining with asymmetric information
Author(s) -
Chen Ying,
Eraslan Hülya
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
theoretical economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.404
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1555-7561
pISSN - 1933-6837
DOI - 10.3982/te821
Subject(s) - legislator , veto , ideology , bargaining power , legislature , distributive property , compromise , rhetoric , microeconomics , voting , outcome (game theory) , economics , law and economics , power (physics) , political science , law , politics , legislation , physics , quantum mechanics , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics , pure mathematics
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.