Spencer Pantoja

I am a game theorist working on questions in the union and intersection of political economy and organizational theory. My primary research agenda is on how political organizations function internally; connecting and contrasting the theory of the firm to political parties, bureaucracies, dictatorships and other nonfirm organizations. 

I can be contacted at spantoja@stanford.edu.

[Curriculum Vitae]

References:
Steven Callander (Primary), Stanford University;
Matthew O. Jackson (Co-Primary), Stanford University;
Scott Gehlbach, The University of Chicago;
Robert Gibbons, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Working Papers

A Formal Theory of Parties in Legislatures [Draft]

I model parties in legislatures as information sharing mechanisms. A party forms when a group of legislators share their private information on their own policy preferences with a designated member—the party “whip”. The whip uses this information to craft policies that benefit the party as a whole and that, over time, make all members better off. In my theory, the party is essential—the same outcomes are not attainable if legislators share their information directly or if all information is made public. Information sharing has its downsides, however, as the whip may exploit the information shared with her. The ability to depose a party whip constrains her incentives, enabling legislators to trust the whip, and for the party to work. This party logic leads to new insights. Counterintuitively, the party is weakest, and often fails, when members are ideologically aligned as the threat of dissolution is then not sufficient to keep everyone well-behaved.

Presented at: 2023 Asian School in Economic Theory; 9th Workshop on Relational Contracts; 2024 Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Conference; 2024 Midwest Political Science Association Conference (Session Organizer); 2024 Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics; GAMES 2024, the 7th World Congress of the Game Theory Society (Session Organizer); WUSTL Conference for Early Career Scholars in Theoretical Political Economy; University of Chicago Harris Political Economy Lunch; UC Berkeley Research Workshop in American Politics.

Competitive Alliance Formation with Álvaro Delgado-Vega

Two great powers compete for policy concessions from two countries by announcing policy-contingent divisions of a pie. The incumbent power announces first, followed by the entrant, after which countries choose policies. The incumbent designs a doctrine that is robust to the entrant's inducements, exploiting the entrant's trade-off between overcommitting to lure one country away from the incumbent and exposing the other to capture.  When countries care about independent pies, all concessions accrue to the stronger power, and welfare increases as the powers' strengths converge. When countries compete for a common pie, loyalty blocs emerge: countries align with different powers, and welfare increases as those powers weaken.

Presented at:  Michigan State University (October 2025); Carlos III Alumni Conference (Summer 2025); Cornell University; 1st Workshop of Organizational and Political Economics in Chicago; Ronald Coase Workshop; SAEe 2025; 11th Annual Princeton-Warwick-Yale Political Economy Conference.

A Relational Theory of Autocracy [Draft] with Scott Gehlbach and Zhaotian Luo 

We examine a dynamic agency model with matching in which agents can attempt to seize power from the principal. In this environment, a stable regime is a relational contract in which the ruler compensates the agent, the agent exerts effort on behalf of the ruler, and the agent does not attempt to seize power. We identify three principles governing such regimes. Under the first principle, exemplified by Uganda under Idi Amin, high resource rents encourage the dictator to rule essentially alone, sharing power with no close individual. The second principle, which we associate with Stalin’s henchman Vyacheslav Molotov, states that rulers who do recruit agents select those who are neither too incompetent nor too competent. Finally, the third principle, which we suggest characterizes Ataturk’s relationship with Turkish statesman Ismet Inonu, says that more competent autocrats are willing to recruit more competent agents—a form of assortative matching.

Presented at: University of Chicago Harris Political Economy Lunch; Utah Organizational & Political Economics Winter Conference; Aspen Political Economics Conference; 2025 Western Political Science Association Conference; 2025 Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics;  2025 American Political Science Association Conference; Stanford Political Economy Seminar; 2026 AEA Annual Meeting.

Works in Progress

Dynamic Public Opinion with Avidit Acharya and Steven Callander

A long-standing question in the study of politics is the direction of causality between public opinion and elite position taking. Do leaders follow the preferences of voters? Or does causality run the other way, with voters following elites? We develop a formal model of elite position taking and dynamic public opinion that disentangles causality to provide answers to these questions. In equilibrium, causality runs both ways. In particular, we characterize the strength of causality and show that it is time and context dependent. Voters follow elites on policy the most when elites take positions early and against prevailing opinion, while elites follow public opinion more when taking a position later, matching their position taking to shifts in public opinion. The model organizes the mixed empirical findings by predicting when elite positions  move public opinion and by how much, when elites respond to public opinion, and  why both causal channels are generated by the same strategic forces.

How is a Dictatorship (not) like a Firm? [Slides] with Scott Gehlbach and Zhaotian Luo 

In this perspectives style article, we investigate the extent to which formal models in organizational economics (ostensibly with firms in mind) could be applied to dictatorships, what alterations would need to be made in this new context of dictatorship, and how the alterations might also teach us something about firms. We focus on three features much more salient in dictatorships than in firms: dependence of incentives on survival of principal, availability of any formal contracts, and the ability of agent to replace principal. 

Presented at: 2025 Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics 

Goal Complexity and Organizational Conflict with Yunus Aybas

“In actual organizational practice, no one attempts to find an optimal solution for the whole problem. Instead, various groups of decisions are made by specialized units of the organization. . .We do not have to postulate conflict in personal motivations in order to explain conflicts [across units in an organization]. They could, and would, equally well arise if each of the organizational decision-making roles were being enacted by digital computers.” —Herbert Simon (1964) 

The above Herbert Simon quote inspired this project. Every firm, whether they make ball bearings, bottle caps, or corrugated cardboard, is filled with organizational conflict, often across departmental lines. Clearly, the employees did not have these strong opinions about cardboard before joining the firm—thus, something about occupying their specialized organizational roles leads to the conflict in perspectives. How should the design of specialized subunits/departments take into account the endogenously generated conflict this creates?

 Economics has models of organizational design in which we allocate knowledge and specializations (Marschak and Radner, 1972; Van Zandt, 1999; Garicano, 2000). However, in all of these models (collectively called the team theory literature), all players have the same preferences— that is, there is no conflict. Economics also has models which capture the problem of resolving conflict between departments (Alonso, Dessein and Matouschek, 2008; Rantakari, 2008), where a department has both specialized knowledge and biased preferences towards that knowledge. But these papers never look back on where these departments came from—shouldn’t the same person designing solutions to resolve this conflict anticipated the conflict they were creating by making many specialized departments? 

In this paper, we model the tradeoff inherent in organizational design of adding another perspective into the organization—more aggregate knowledge within the organization, but more disagreement on how any given decision should be made that somehow must be resolved. An organization faces a stream of “problems”, which are subsets of a space of “problem attributes”. For each problem, they must make a decision, whose performance depends on the set of attributes pertaining to the problem. A department is a player who specializes in a subset of problem attributes—the smaller the subset, the more accurately the player understands how to address that subset of attributes, but we assume they only care about how solutions perform with respect to their department’s subset of the attribute space. Thus, generalists are more aligned with the organizational objective (although less knowledgeable about any given detail).

 We characterize the optimal allocation of expertise and management of conflict. We find conditions under which we should find an interior number of departments, in spite of the fact that we have no labor costs in adding a department and more departments always means more aggregate knowledge. In doing this exercise, we explain why organizations of different types have different internal structures and conflict management styles.