We examine the optimal financing of infrastructure when governments have limited financial commitment and can expropriate rents from private sector firms that manage infrastructure. While private firms need incentives to implement projects well, governments need incentives to limit...

We study a standard collective action problem in which successful achievement of a group interest requires costly participation by some fraction of its members. How should we model the internal organization of these groups when there is asymmetric information about the preferences of their...

Two potentially asymmetric players compete for a prize of common value, which is initially unknown, by exerting efforts. A designer has two instruments for contest design. First, she decides whether and how to disclose an informative signal of the prize value to players. Second, she sets the...

The literature on voluntary provision of public goods includes recent theoretical work on the formation of voluntary coalitions to provide public goods. Theory is ambiguous on the equilibrium coalition size and contribution rates. We examine the emergence of coalitions, their size, and how...

In the context of collecting property taxes from 13432 households in a district of Lima (Peru), we investigate whether prioritized enforcement can improve the effective use of limited enforcement capacity. We randomly assign households to two treatment arms: one replicating the city's usual...

Game theory makes strong predictions about how individuals should behave in two player, zero sum games. When players follow a mixed strategy, equilibrium payoffs should be equalized across actions, and choices should be serially uncorrelated. Laboratory experiments have generated large and...

Consider an environment where long-lived experts repeatedly interact with short-lived customers. In periods when an expert is hired, she chooses between providing a profitable major treatment or a less profitable minor treatment. The expert has private information about which treatment best...