The Role of Information and Inequality on Political Institutions Open Access
Kim, Seoyeon (Summer 2025)
Abstract
Institutions shape political and economic outcomes, but they do so within an environment of unequal access to information and asymmetric power dynamics. My dissertation examines how these asymmetries influence decision-making in broadly three institutional settings - regulatory policymaking, coalition bargaining, and bureaucratic coordination - focusing on the ways in which information access, bargaining power, and coordination constraints shape decision-making.
In Strategic Experiments Under Regulatory Uncertainty, I present a model of policymaking in complex domains. I apply the model to a hypothetical situation in which a firm has developed a new product but is uncertain about its quality. The firm can acquire more information about the quality of the product, but knows that this information will be "public" in the sense that it will also be observed by the regulator. The firm's choice about information is represented as a Blackwell experiment. After the firm designs its experiment and the result of the experiment is realized, the firm and regulator can each take unilateral costly action to discover the truth. Thus, the firm wants to learn enough to make the optimal choice regarding revealing the true state but also wants to prevent the regulator from knowing too much. In equilibrium, the firm chooses to reveal partial information with a binary experiment. In particular, the firm’s optimal experiment is informative only about whether the firm or the regulator has an incentive to invest in discovering the product's true quality.
In Bargaining for Longevity, I propose a theoretical framework of government coalitions in which a proposer with complete discretion over resource allocation between her and a partner faces a trade-off between immediate gains and long-term stability. I particularly focus on the role of dynamic outside options in driving this trade-off and show that the real benefit of being a proposer may not be in the share she appropriates within a coalition but rather in her choice of coalition longevity. The proposer sometimes concedes to her partner and buys his long-term support just so that she can be the one to time the dissolution of the coalition. This mechanism lends additional support to the lack of proposer advantage in portfolio allocation as well as the relative strength of weak parties discussed in the empirical literature. I further identify conditions under which parties may agree on their choice to use commitment devices.
Lastly, I show in a co-authored work, Coordination in Bureaucratic Policy-Making, how agencies with overlapping policy responsibilities coordinate their decisions. We consider a model of coordination in which a political executive can provide subsidized coordination between two agencies and consider how this possibility affects both the agencies' incentives and, ultimately, social welfare. Our model of subsidizing coordination is very simple: an executive can invest her own resources in a coordination protocol that the agencies can (but need not) use to align their decisions. We consider the impact of scarce attention at the agency level and demonstrate that, while coordination between the agencies is maximized by the agencies having aligned policy preferences, the fact that the executive can invest in the coordination protocol undermines these incentives.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
1 Strategic Experiments Under Regulatory Uncertainty 1
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Benchmark Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 Equilibrium Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.4 Comparative Statics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.5 Preference for Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.6 Some Extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2 Bargaining for Longevity 32
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.2 The Baseline Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.3 Interpreting the Assumptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.4 Equilibrium Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.5 Additional Extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2.6 Discussion and Empirical Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3 Coordination in Bureaucratic Policy-Making 62
3.1 Coordination in Bureaucratic Policy-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.2 A Simple Model of Policy Coordination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.3 Subsidized Coordination with Endogenous Fairness . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.4 So Why Are there Organizational Divisions? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
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