TY  - JOUR
AU  - Acemoglu,Daron
AU  - Egorov,Georgy
AU  - Sonin,Konstantin
TI  - Dynamics and Stability of Constitutions, Coalitions, and Clubs
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14239
PY  - 2008
Y2  - August 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14239
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14239.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Daron Acemoglu
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-380B
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA  02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-1927
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: daron@mit.edu

Georgy Egorov
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University
2001 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
Tel: 847/467-2154
Fax: 847/467-1220
E-Mail: g-egorov@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Konstantin Sonin
New Economic School
47 Nakhimovsky prosp.
Moscow, 117418  RUSSIA
E-Mail: ksonin@nes.ru
AB  - A central feature of dynamic collective decision-making is that the rules that govern the procedures for future decision-making and the distribution of political power across players are determined by current decisions. For example, current constitutional change must take into account how the new constitution may pave the way for further changes in laws and regulations. We develop a general framework for the analysis of this class of dynamic problems. Under relatively natural acyclicity assumptions, we provide a complete characterization of dynamically stable states as functions of the initial state and determine conditions for their uniqueness. We show how this framework can be applied in political economy, coalition formation, and the analysis of the dynamics of clubs. The explicit characterization we provide highlights two intuitive features of dynamic collective decision-making: (1) a social arrangement is made stable by the instability of alternative arrangements that are preferred by sufficiently many members of the society; (2) efficiency-enhancing changes are often resisted because of further social changes that they will engender.
ER  -