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This dissertation consists of five independent essays: Reliability and Responsibility: A Theory of Endogenous Commitment. A common assumption in Political Science is that candidates are committed to their policy announcement. In the first chapter I present a model of political competition where candidates announce policies that might not correspond to the policies that are actually implemented. I analyze the possibility of transmitting information to voters through costless electoral campaign. I stem on Down's intuition that meaningful electoral campaigns must be based on candidates' reliability and responsibility. Through the analysis of an incomplete information model of finitely repeated elections I show that electoral promises are able to transmit reliable information to voters. Electoral campaign provides an instrument to discipline politicians linking re-election perspectives to the fulfillment of electoral promises and contributes to solve the informational asymmetries between candidate and voters. An unavoidable proportion of ambiguous politicians emerge. These results are robust to the consideration of equilibrium refinements. Implementation with State Dependent Feasible Sets and Preferences: A Renegotiation Approach. The second chapter (fruit of a joint work with Luis Corchón) provides a framework of analysis for situations in which the feasible set is unknown to the planner. The concept of reversion function is used, which describes the process that society uses to deal with unfeasibilities (punishment, renegotiation, legal system). This reduces the problem of implementation with unknown feasible to the case in which preferences are unknown. We characterize the maximal set of Social Choice Correspondences that can be implemented in a class of renegotiation functions that do not reward agents for infeasibilities. Applications to Exchange Economies, Bargaining and Bankruptcy are presented. The impossibility to take into account in the renegotiation process of individual messages imposes strong restrictions to implementation. The results are compared to the findings of literature on "feasible implementation". Ramón y Canal: Mediation and Meritocracy. The third chapter (fruit of a joint work with Antonio Romero-Medina) analyzes the centralized matching mechanism associated to the Ramon y Canal Program. This Program is used in Spain to promote the hiring of top researchers in Spanish R&D centers and academic institutions. We model the process as a bilateral matching market to study if the mechanism provides the incentives to hire good researchers. We analyze the model both under complete and incomplete information. The comparison of the theoretical findings with the available data of the program indicates that the model provides poor incentives to the agents involved and does not prevent from collusion between research centers and candidates. While the objective is to reward the best researchers the mechanism only guarantees "almost stable solutions. The Condorcet Winner: Incomplete Information, Implementation and Multiplicity. The fourth chapter studies the implementation of the Condorcet Winner under incomplete information. It is shown that a trade-off between the robustness of the Condorcet Winner and equilibrium multiplicity appears. For a non negligible set of probability distributions exact implementation of Condorcet consistent social choice functions cannot be obtained. The result is proven in single peaked environments and extended to more general setups. A positive result is provided for uniform priors. Coordination in Sequential Admission Mechanisms. The fifth chapter considers a family of admission (or hiring) mechanisms in which participant are allowed to send multiple applications, as it happens in many real life situations. This is done by extending the model presented by Alcalde and Romero- Medina (2000). The possibility of applying to different colleges imposes serious coordination problems to colleges themselves. Unstable equilibrium allocations may arise. Stability can be recovered only imposing application fees.

Actor-network theory (ANT) has contributed greatly to the development of science and technology studies. However, recent critiques appear to have left ANT in a gloomy theoretical black box. What is the likelihood of ANT exiting its current theoretical discontent? Is ANT worthy of salvation and on what grounds? Law argues that recent critiques stem from ANT's development into a particular theoretical strategy. However, this article will argue that by focusing on strategy as messy and impure, ANT can be afforded the opportunity to shift from a fixed approach to an ambiguous and contingent strategy, well placed to carry on. The article achieves such an argument by first highlighting how ANT has contributed to a recent study of strategy in action; second, by outlining the strategic aspects of ANT; and third, by using the study of strategy in action as a means of engaging with ANT's current theoretical discontent.

Part 4: Design and Values ; International audience ; The maturity of e-government implementation in research and practice has developed tremendously over the years. Nevertheless, the challenges encountered and the overall growth of e-government in different countries varies; studies by organizations such as the UN and World Bank evidence these variations. To successfully implement e-government, governments are required to deepen their understanding of aspects such as benefits, challenges and success factors. Contributing to this knowledge and understanding, the paper investigates factors framing successful design and implementation of e-government systems. The paper presents and analyses the literature and results from an e-government inquiry in Germany. The paper highlights important factors for successful implementation of e-government and also presents opinions on strategic aspects for e-government systems design with reference to Germany. It finally highlights the need for further research in the domain.

This paper examines the committee assignment process for Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Unlike previous studies of committee assignments, this paper employs data on the requests for assignments submitted by members to the Committee on Committees. The theoretical perspective employed is one in which all the participants in the process are rational actors who have goals they want to achieve and who choose among alternative courses of action on the basis of which alternative is most likely to lead to the achievement of those goals. We argue that the allocation of committee assignments affects the goals of all the participants in the process, and thus we consider the choices of actors in the process in terms of their goals; specifically the goals of re-election, influence within the House, and good public policy.After first considering the process from the point of view of the member making requests, we show that the member's requests are related to the type of district he represents, and that the number of requests he makes is related to such considerations as whether he is a freshman, whether he faces competition from a member from his state, and whether there is a vacancy from his state on his most preferred committee.The process is also considered from the point of view of the members making the assignments. Decisions on assignments are found to be affected by seniority (where success in getting requested committees is inversely related to seniority), margin of election (where members from marginal districts are more successful), and region (where southerners are less successful than members from other regions).