The Paradox of New Members in the EU Council of Ministers: A Non-cooperative Bargaining Analysis

Power indices suggest that adding new members to a voting body may increase the power of an existing member, even if the number of votes of all existing members and the decision rule remain constant. This phenomenon is known as the paradox of new members. This paper uses the leading model of majoritarian bargaining and shows that the paradox is predicted in equilibrium for past EU enlargements. Furthermore, a majority of members would have been in favor of the 1981 enlargement even if members were bargaining over a fixed budget.Majoritarian Bargaining, Weighted Voting, Power Measures, EU Enlargement, Paradox of New Members

Inequity Aversion May Increase Inequity

Inequity aversion models have been used to explain equitable payoff divisions in bargaining games. I show that inequity aversion can actually increase the asymmetry of payoff division if unanimity is not required. This is due to the analogy between inequity aversion and risk aversion. Inequity aversion may also affect comparative statics: the advantage of being proposer can decrease as players become more impatient.Noncooperative Bargaining, Coalition Formation, Inequity Aversion

Altruism, Spite and Competition in Bargaining Games

This paper shows that altruism may be beneficial in bargaining when there is competition for bargaining partners. In a game with random proposers, the most altruistic player has the highest material payoff if players are sufficiently patient. However, this advantage is eroded as the discount factor increases, and if players are perfectly patient altruism and spite become irrelevant for material payoffs.altruism, spite, bargaining, competition, coalition formation

Euro-Mediterranean Process - Union for the Mediterranean: Macroeconomic and financial developments during the global crisis at the southern rim of the Mediterranean

Although the global financial and economic crisis hurt economies worldwide, the economies at the southern Mediterranean region have done relatively well to weather this global hurricane. Economic growth in the region has slowed down but the size of the trough of these economies' business cycle has ultimately been dependent on the length and vigour of domestic economic policy reactions. Escaping from a difficult period featuring soaring food and oil prices the economies of the southern Mediterranean region are faced with new challenges that impact both their real and financial sectors, as negative effects from their real sector spilled over to their financial sectors. This chapter analyzes recent macroeconomic, monetary and financial developments, the use of fiscal, monetary and financial policy instruments, the volatility at their financial markets, trade openness and the imperative need for good governance which is the umbrella under which economic policy instruments are called to operate.Mediterranean union; macroeconomics; global crisis;

Two-Stage Bargaining with Reversible Coalitions: the Case of Apex Games

This paper studies coalition formation and payoff division in a class of majority games (apex games) assuming that payoff division can only be agreed upon after forming the coalition (two-stage bargaining) and that negotiations in the coalition can break down and a new coalition be formed (reversible coalitions). In contrast with the results of other two-stage models, all minimal winning coalitions may form and expected payoffs coincide with the per capita nucleolus. These results are robust to small changes in the bargaining procedure. Surprisingly, having a two-stage process (rather than a one-stage process with simultaneous coalition formation and payoff division) benefits the apex player.coalition formation, two-stage bargaining, reversible coalitions, apex games, per capita nucleolus

Proportional payoffs in legislative bargaining with weighted voting: a characterization

This paper examines the relationship between voting weights and expected equilibrium payoffs in legislative bargaining and provides a necessary and sufficient condition for payoffs to be proportional to weights. This condition has a natural interpretation in terms of the supply and demand for coalition partners. An implication of this condition is that Snyder et al.'s (2005) result, that payoffs are proportional to weights in large replicated games, does not necessarily extend to the smaller games that arise in applications. Departures from proportionality may be substantial and may arise even in well-behaved (homogeneous) games

Decentralised reliable guaranteed cost control of uncertain systems: an LMI design

© 2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The problem of designing a decentralised control scheme for a class of linear large scale interconnected systems with norm-bounded time-varying parameter uncertainties under a class of control failures is addressed. These failures are described by a model that considers possible outages or partial failures in every single actuator of each decentralised controller. The control design is performed through two steps. First, a decentralised reliable guaranteed cost control set is derived and, second, a feasible linear matrix inequalities procedure is presented for the effective construction of the control set. A numerical example illustrates the efficiency of the proposed control schemePeer ReviewedPostprint (published version