Essays in Global Games and Political Economy

This dissertation consists of three essays concerned with coordination, cooperation and the governance of institutions. The first chapter analyzes the effect of coordination incentives on committee decision- making. When members of a selection committee have incentives to agree with each other, they over-weight public information; this generates statistical discrimination. We test this hypothesis using a novel field experiment - a large debate tournament in which judges are randomly assigned to committees that decide results - and find that judges with greater desire to coordinate are more likely to vote for teams with better past records. To understand the magnitude and implications of these estimated effects, we then develop and estimate a structural model in which committee members with incentives to cooperate receive noisy signals of candidate quality. Our results confirm that public information can cause committees to coordinate on weaker candidates.;The second chapter considers the governance challenges posed by the developing technology of geoengineering. We argue that geoengineering may constitute a "free-driver" problem, in which the country or actor that suffers most from climate change free-drives the global level of geoengineering. The chapter presents a simple model of free-driving and identifies the parameters that govern whether a problem is one of free-riding or free- driving. We apply this model to geoengineering, by providing a qualitative synthesis of the literature on climate change damages, then by using estimates of regional climate damage heterogeneity from the RICE model. The result is a first-pass attempt at quantitatively identifying which regions are most likely to be in favor of geoengineering, and which against. It appears that free-driving is a serious possibility, but there is significant space for effective negotiation.;The third chapter combines a general election model in which candidates have policy preferences with a primary election process which takes the form of a citizen-candidate model. We use this to establish conditions under which both models are well-behaved, and then characterize equilibria. Divergence of proposed platforms within the party primary is common, and in equilibrium candidates more extreme than their party median may not only stand for, but win both the primary and general elections.