Incentives and Political Economy

Incentives and Political Economy constructs a normative approach to constitutional design using recent developments in contract theory. It treats political economy as the study of the incentive problems created by the delegation of economic policy to self-interested politicians. Politicians are treated successively as informed supervisors or residual decision-makers. The optimal constitutional responses to the activities of interest groups are characterized in various circumstances, as well as the optimal trade-off between flexibility of decision-making and discretion to pursue personal agendas when the incompleteness of the constitutional contract is recognized.