Agency and Dynamics in Political Economy

经济决策的政治过程涉及几个委托-代理关系，其中代理人代表委托人采取行动或决定，委托人提供激励以诱使代理人以委托人的最佳利益行事。最值得注意的是，在一些常见的机构中，几个委托人以非合作的方式行事，试图影响代理人的选择。这一过程也会随着时间的推移而延长。这就要求政治行为者在不确定的情况下做出选择。它还允许在囚犯困境等冲突中进行一些合作。拟议的研究建立在这两个广泛主题的基础上，并将其应用于几个具有理论和实践意义的问题1。欧洲央行--欧洲央行的正式组成类似于德国央行--是独立的，致力于价格稳定。但在实践中，它可以受到成员国政府的影响。德国人担心这种政治化会导致过度通胀。有人建议通过政治化的两个方面的理论模型来考察这个问题。第一个涉及不合作，因此政府作为独立的委托人影响着他们的共同代理人。初步分析显示，如果各国政府能够致力于欧洲央行的激励计划，这不会导致过度通胀。第二个问题是缺乏承诺。这引发了货币政策时间一致性的常见问题，现在又因几国政府之间的囚徒困境而雪上加霜。初步分析表明，该模型的计算结果与直观结果吻合较好。进一步的研究将考察在这一困境博弈中最优可持续默会合作的设计。共同机构与知情的委托人-欧洲各国政府在与欧洲央行打交道时，拥有关于共同感兴趣事项的私人信息；然后，他们的激励计划可以将这些信息透露给银行家，每个政府在与其他政府的互动中都面临着类似赢家诅咒的正式情况。这一观察结果表明，需要一种更普遍的、具有知情多重委托人的共同代理理论。这样的理论还将找到其他有用的应用。最值得注意的是，它可以比较和调和游说理论中两种对立的观点--一种观点认为游说者为“购买”政策做出贡献，另一种观点认为游说者的主要功能是提供信息。政治立场的动态--一些政党的政策立场含糊其辞；另一些政党在问题立场上采取明确而坚定的立场。有人建议将其建模为选民偏好不确定情况下的不可逆转选择博弈。猜测是，目前更受欢迎的政党将保持其纲领的模糊性，而较小的政党则采取坚定的立场，希望在政治光谱中选票丰富的部分站稳脚跟。其他工作-这包括对最近工作的扩展和修改，包括以下内容。[i]一种游说模式，在这种模式下，政府充当委托人，并宣布其政策，以回应捐款。[ii]几个政党之间默契妥协的模式，在他们的政治支持波动时，分享现有的经济战利品。[3]从政治权力与持有政府债券的倾向之间的相关性来解释政府承诺偿还债务的可信度。

The political process of economic policymaking involves several principal-agent relationships, where an agent takes an action or decision on behalf of a principal, and the principal offers incentives to induce the agent to act in the principal's best interest. Most notably, there are common agencies where several principals acting non-cooperatively try to influence the choices of the agent. The process also extends through time. This requires the political actors to make choices under uncertainty. It also allows some cooperation cooperation in conflicts like prisoners' dilemmas. The proposed research builds on and applies these two broad themes to several questions of theoretical and practical interest.1. The European Central Bank - The formal constitution of the ECB is similar to that of the Bundesbank - independent and dedicated to price stability. But in practice it can be influenced by the member governments. The Germans fear that such politicization will lead to excessive inflation. It is proposed to examine this question by theoretical modeling of two aspects of politicization. The first deals with non-cooperation, so the governments act as separate principals influencing their common agent. Preliminary analysis shows that this does not cause excessive inflation if the governments can commit to their incentive schemes for the ECB. The second deals with lack of commitment. This raises the usual problem of time-consistency in monetary policy, now compounded by a prisoners' dilemma among the several governments. Preliminary analysis shows that the results of this model conform well to intuition. Further research will examine the design of the optimal sustainable tacit cooperation in this dilemma game.2. Common Agency with Informed Principals - The European governments have private information on matters of common interest when they deal with the ECB; then their incentive schemes can reveal this information to the banker, and each government faces a situation formally like that of the winner's curse in its interaction with other governments. This observation suggests the need for a more general theory of common agency with informed multiprincipals. Such a theory will also find other useful applications. Most notably it can compare and reconcile two rival views in the theory of lobbying - one view holds that lobbies make contributions to "buy" policies, and the other argues that lobbies' main function is to provide information.3. Dynamics of Political Positioning - Some parties leave their policy positions vague; others take a clear and firm stand on issue positions. It is proposed to model this as a game of irreversible choices under uncertainty about voter preferences. The conjecture is that the party currently enjoying more popularity will keep its platform vague, while smaller parties take firm positions in the hope of entrenching themselves in the vote-rich part of the political spectrum.4. Other work - This consists of extensions and modifications of recent work, and includes the following. [i] A model of lobbying where the government acts as the principal and announces its policy as a response to contributions. [ii] A model oftacit compromise among several parties to split the available economic spoils as their political support fluctuates. [iii] Explaining the credibility of government's promise to repay its debt in terms of a correlation between political power and the propensity to hold government bonds.