▼ A large body of literature in political economy emphasizes the importance of limiting opportunities for manipulation of legislative institutions by self-interested actors. We show that that the very conditions that shield institutions from agenda manipulation are precisely those that expose them to capture by special interests. This result holds in a highly general dynamic framework that encompasses a broad range of empirically relevant agenda institutions and policy-making environments, including those with policy uncertainty and experimentation. [Less]

▼ We study a cooperative game that arises from service capacity pooling among firms with heterogeneous customer bases, modelled as an M/G/1 queue subject to a performance constraint. Deciding core emptiness is NP-hard in general, and the trade-off between a load-sharing effect (pro-pooling) and a variability-inducing effect from heterogeneous service times (anti-pooling) can yield nonconcavity. Nevertheless, if players have similar waiting time constraints, we establish total balancedness through an explicit core allocation accounting for both server load and service requirement variability. [Less]

▼ Housing is a critical determinant of both individual livelihoods and broader economic development. In the context of China’s evolving socio-economic landscape, housing policy should be anchored in three main principles: (i) recognizing the commodity nature of housing within a well-regulated market framework; (ii) prioritizing its residential function as a means of securing basic living conditions; and (iii) maintaining a market-oriented reform path supported by effective state governance. To translate this philosophy into practice, policy efforts should focus on deepening systemic reform, strengthening the legal and regulatory infrastructure, curbing speculative activity, promoting the development of a robust rental housing market, and fostering the integration of urban and rural housing systems. [Less]