I study the optimal supply of exible commitment devices to people who value both commitment and exibility, and whose preferences exhibit varying degrees of time incon- sistency. I …nd that, if time inconsistency is observable, then both a monopolist and a planner supply devices that enable each...

Two players need to agree to adopt a certain option, otherwise the status quo is maintained. The correct choice depends of an unknown state variable. While both players would like the correct choice to be made, their relative concern with the two types of mistakes may differ and is private...

This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient...

This paper investigates a general relationship between risk and time preferences. I consider a decision maker who chooses between consumption of a particular prize in one period and a different prize in another period. The individual believes that today’s good is certain, and that, as the...

Dynamic consistency leads to Bayesian updating under expected utility. We ask what it implies for the updating of more general preferences. In this paper, we charac- terize dynamically consistent update rules for preference models satisfying ambiguity aversion. This characterization extends to...

Since campaign finance reform is usually motivated by the concern that existing legislation can not effectively prevent campaign contributions to ‘buy favors’, this paper assumes that contributions influence political decisions. But, given that it is also widely recognized that interest...

We present a simple model of elections in which experts with special interests endorse candidates and endorsements are observed by the voters. We show that the equilibrium election outcome is biased towards the experts' interests even though voters know the distribution of expert interests and...

We present a model of participation in elections in small networks, in which citizens su¤er from cross-pressures if voting against the alternative preferred by some of their social contacts. We analyze how the existence of cross-pressures may shape voting decisions, and so, political outcomes;...

In models of non-deterministic contest, players exert irreversible effort in order to increase their probability of winning a prize. The most prominent functional form of the win probability in the literature is the so-called “logit” contest success function. We provide a simple...