ABSTRACT
The literature on agenda control generally concerns a social decision problem wherein one participant is differentially advantaged relative to others in their ability to influence the outcome. One of the classic instances of such an arrangement is the use of closed or restrictive rules in legislative decision-making (cf. Denzau and Mackay [30]) under which a particular subset of a collective is able to determine the set of alternatives from which the collective can select an outcome. Consider a one-dimensional policy space X C IR from which two players, labelled the committee and the floor, select a final outcome from X, and where the floor is decisive in any choice of outcomes. Assume the floor and the committee have single-peaked symmetric preferences over X9 with the floor's ideal outcome equal to ^ = 0 and the committee's equal to xc > 0. Under a closed rule the committee is per mitted to make a 'take-it-or-leave-it' proposal to the floor, ie. if the committee proposes x, then the floor's choice is either to accept or reject x, where rejection implies the outcome is equal to the 'status quo' outcome x0.
