Formal models of authority - Introduction and political economy applications

Talcot Parsons suggested in 1963 that there are basically three kinds of au thority: utilitarian authority, coercive authority, and persuasive authorit y. In this paper, I show that the models developed by Gibbons and Rutten (1 997), Hirshleifer (1991), Skaperdas (1992), Akerlof (1976) and Basu (1986) can be viewed as models where issues such as authority, power, influence an d ideology, in the sense of Parsons, can be formally discussed. I also show the existence of an interesting difficulty in providing a contractarian in terpretation of the State under the Parsonian view of governmental authorit y discussed in this paper.