The first session of the conference focused on agency problems and constitutional issues, respectively. The integrating theme was the comparative performance of different political institutions. It opened with Ethan Bueno de Mesquita (University of Chicago), who compared the performance of two different institutions to allocate the multiple tasks of the executive branch of government. He focused on how the degree of decentralization of the executive tasks may affect performance and voter welfare. Michael Ting (Columbia University) also compared different institutions, to explore the comparative ability of institutions to cooperate and collaborate. His paper develops a model to show that incentives to collaborate are most likely to arise when prizes are moderate: larger prizes induce too much competition, and smaller prizes fail to provide adequate incentives, leading to an abandonment of productive competition. James Snyder (Harvard University) then presented an empirical study of judicial elections in the U.S.A. His key finding is that partisan elections for judges tend to produce less competent judges. He also finds that when party labels accompany the name of the candidates, voters usually do not use any other information (such as past performance) to decide their vote. Without partisan labels, voters use proxies for the candidates' ideologies and, as a result, the quality of the candidates has some effect on the outcome.

Steven Callander (Stanford University) opened the second half of the first session with a paper on federalism, which he modeled as a tournament between the federated states to choose optimal institutions, and compared federalist systems with different degrees of decentralization. His results suggest that a good system would be a progressive federalist union which allows the states to make policy recommendations and combines it with a centralized implementation state. This system minimizes the incentives to free ride and still accounts for the heterogeneity of preferences. John Ferejohn (New York University) discussed the benefits and costs of "checks and balances" in presidential systems, with reference to the recent trends of stronger executive powers in the U.S. system. He suggested that checks of the Congress on the President are necessary; however they are not very effective as currently specified.