We study subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms that have been proposed as a solution to incomplete contracting problems. We show that these mechanisms - which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that impose large fines for lying and the inappropriate use of arbitration -...

A nudge is a paternalistic government intervention that attempts to improve choices by changing the framing of a decision problem. We propose a welfare-theoretic foundation for nudging similar in spirit to the classical revealed preference approach, by investigating a model where preferences and...

Intuitive decision making has a large and often negative impact in economic decisions, but its measurement and quantification remains challenging. Following research from psychology, behavioral economists have often attempted to causally manipulate the balance of intuition and deliberation by...

A recent literature emphasizes the importance of the gender gap in willingness to compete as a partial explanation for gender differences in labor market outcomes. However, whereas experiments investigating willingness to compete typically do so in anonymous environments, real world competitions...

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocation reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...

This paper examines multi-battle contests whose extensive form can be represented in terms of a finite state machine. We start by showing that any contest that satisfies our assumptions decomposes into two phases, a principal phase (in which states cannot be revisited) and a concluding...

We consider a class of incomplete-information Colonel Blotto games in which N ≥ 2 agents are engaged in (N + 1) battlefields. An agent's vector of battlefield valuations is drawn from a generalized sphere in Lp-space. We identify a Bayes-Nash equilibrium in which any agent's resource...

In this paper, we study N-player Colonel Blotto games with incomplete information about battlefield valuations. Such games arise in job markets, research and development, electoral competition, security analysis, and conflict resolution. For M ≥ N + 1 battlefields, we identify a Bayes-Nash...

While the game-theoretic analysis of conflict is often based on the assumption of multiplicative noise, additive noise such as considered by Hirshleifer (1989) may be equally plausible depending on the application. In this paper, we examine the equilibrium set of the n-player difference-form...