Incomplete Political Contracts with Secret Ballots: Reciprocity as a Force to Enforce Sustainable Clientelistic Relationships

Clientelism is frequently observed in our societies. Various mechanisms that help sustain incomplete political contracts (e.g., monitoring and punishment) have been studied in the literature to date. However, do such contracts emerge in elections with secret ballots when the interactions are one-shot? How does repetition affect the evolution of incomplete political contracts? Using an incentivized experiment, this article finds that even during one-shot interactions where monitoring is not possible, candidates form incomplete contracts through vote buying and promise-making. The candidates’ clientelistic behaviors are heterogeneous: some target swing voters, whereas others offer the most to loyal voters, or even opposition voters. These tactics distort voting behaviors as well as election outcomes. Repeated interactions significantly magnify candidates’ offers and deepen clientelistic relationships. These results underscore the possibility that clientelism evolves due to people’s strategic behaviors and interdependent preferences, without relying on alternative mechanisms (JEL C92, D72).

The role of loyalty in migration intentions: theory and evidence from the EU

Free movement of persons is one of the fundamental values and achievements of the European Union, however, intentions towards mobility vary across and within the member states. Economic literature has remarkable theories to explain migration flows and individual selection factors of potential migrants, but it ignores major achievements of other social sciences. This paper builds an economic framework to incorporate the Hirschmanian concept of loyalty into the microeconomic (human capital) model of international migration by using interdependent preferences. Hirschman assumes that even after exiting, loyal people care about their previous communities, thus it imposes a certain psychological ‘exit tax’ on them. Based on this concept, it is hypothesized that people with altruistic motives have weaker intentions to migrate, so the presence of loyalty towards others makes international migration less likely, conveying that loyalty towards local or national community may be responsible for moderate labor mobility among EU member states. Results show that attachment to one's country makes one's intention to move abroad in the near future less likely, while loyalty towards one's city has more moderate impact on their intentions.

The Marriage Problem with Interdependent Preferences

This paper considers the Gale–Shapley model with interdependent preferences. Women’s preferences over men are common knowledge but whether or not a man is acceptable depends on the preferences of men which are private information. It is shown that no ex-post incentive-compatible and ex-post stable matching rules exist. A characterization of ex-post incentive-compatible, ex-post individually rational and ex-post nonbossy matching rules in terms of modified priority rules is provided.

School choice with asymmetric information: Priority design and the curse of acceptance

We generalize standard school choice models to allow for interdependent preferences and differentially informed students. We show that, in general, the commonly used deferred acceptance mechanism is no longer strategy‐proof, the outcome is not stable, and may make less informed students worse off. We attribute these results to a curse of acceptance. However, we also show that if priorities are designed appropriately, positive results are recovered: equilibrium strategies are simple, the outcome is stable, and less informed students are protected from the curse of acceptance. Our results have implications for the current debate over priority design in school choice.