Considers the impact of game theoretic models of strategic information transmission in politics paying particular attention to the presence of information asymmetries.

A major piece of work . . . a classic. There is no
other book like it.
Norman Schofield, Washington University
The authors succeed brilliantly in tackling a large
number of important questions concerning the
interaction among voters and elected representatives
in the political arena, using a common, rigorous
language.
Antonio Merlo, University of Pennsylvania
Positive Political Theory II: Strategy and Structure
is the second volume in Jeffrey Banks and David
Austen-Smith s monumental study of the links
between individual preferences and...

Positive Political Theory I is concerned with the formal theory of preference aggregation for collective choice. The theory is developed as generally as possible, covering classes of aggregation methods that include such well-known examples as majority and unanimity rule and focusing in particular on the extent to which any aggregation method is assured to yield a set of "best" alternatives. The book is intended both as a contribution to the theory of collective choice and a pedagogic tool.
Austen-Smith and Banks have made the exposition both rigorous and accessible to people with...

Political economy has been an essential realm of inquiry and has attracted myriad intellectual adherents for much of the period of modern scholarship, although its formal split into the distinct disciplines of political science and economics in the nineteenth century has limited the study of important social issues. This volume calls for a reaffirmation of the importance of the unified study of political economy, and explores the frontiers of the interaction between politics and markets. It brings together intellectual leaders from various areas, drawing on state-of-the-art theoretical and...

Social choices, about expenditures on government programs, or about public policy more broadly, or indeed from any conceivable set of alternatives, are determined by politics. This book is a collection of essays that tie together the fields spanned by Jeffrey S. Banks' research on this subject. It examines the strategic aspects of political decision-making, including the choices of voters in committees, the positioning of candidates in electoral campaigns, and the behavior of parties in legislatures. The chapters of this book contribute to the theory of voting with incomplete information, to...

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.