Experimentalists frequently claim that human subjects playing games in the laboratory violate such solution concepts as Nash equilibrium and subgame perfection. This claim is premature. What has been rejected are certain joint hypotheses about preferences, knowledge, and behavior. This note...

We study the long-run behavior of an economy where agents who are heterogeneous with respect to risk attitudes can either earn a certain income or enter a risky rent seeking contest. In contrast with standard evolutionary game theory, we distinguish between utility and material payoffs, and...

Recent literature has questioned the existence of a learning foundation for the partially cursed equilibrium. This paper closes the gap by showing that a partially cursed equilibrium corresponds to a particular analogy-based expectation equilibrium.

The traditional avoidance literature undeservedly neglects tax base distribution as a factor affecting the avoidance price, and generally assumed to be equal to the avoidance cost. In reality, avoidance providers are usually either high-skilled specialists or insiders. The strong collusion thus,...

We consider a leader and a subordinate he appoints who engage in team production. The public observes the organization’s performance, but is unable to determine the separate contributions of the leader and of the subordinate. The leader may therefore claim credit for the good work of his...

Consider team production with two people. Each is characterized by a prior distribution that he will do Right or Wrong. After the outcome of the project is observed, these probabilities are updated. When output depends on the weakest link in production, following project failure the posterior...

This paper studies strategic delegation in two-player contests for an indivisible prize (as in, e.g. litigation) where one party's probability of winning is determined by the relative investments of both. Even though neither player stands to gain anything from the possibility of one player...

This study investigates under what circumstances there exist a separating equilibrium in which competent leaders choose incompetent co-workers and incompetent leaders choose competent co-workers. The driving force for the competent leader is the insurance motive; if things go wrong he can blame...

We consider a two-player contest for a prize of common but uncertain value. We show that less resources are spent in equilibrium if one party is privately informed about the value of the prize than if either both agents are informed or neither agent is informed. Furthermore, the uninformed agent...

A leader of an organization may view a subordinate as threatening or weakening the leader's position. The threat may increase with the subordinate's ability and reduce the rents the leader wins. In particular, a leader who trains his subordinate reduces the cost to the owner of a firm in...