Paper Titles & Abstracts

Ever since its earliest days as a nascent theory in economics in the US of the 1970s, one of the most stable features in Principal-Agent (PA) theory has been the adverse effect of conflict within a collective principal body made up of multiple individual units on its ability to exert influence over a unitary agent. Only very recently has the field of EU studies pushed the boundaries of this conceptual simplification and has started to open the 'agent black-box' to see how conflict in a 'collective agent' plays out in a PA setting. The underlying notion has always been that conflict is detrimental to the collective agent's performance, as it is to the collective principal's. In this paper I present a very different reasoning. Arguing that collective agents are inherently more hierarchical and under the scope condition that time is not a constraining factor, I maintain that they are much better preference aggregators in the face of issue competition than collective principals. In fact, heavy intra-body contestation can help the agent increase its leeway by improving its 'authority' vis-à-vis the principal, transcending PA's purely rational-choice set-up and striking some common ground with constructivist approaches to agent autonomy. After surveying collective agent-collective principal relationships in the US, EU, and global governance systems to show that my argument is universally applicable, I illustrate the implications of my findings against the backdrop of EU external relations, where collective agent phenomena have originally been introduced into the corpus of PA literature.