This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucrats participate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, but they also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of the total budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbying constitutes a contest among the...

This paper discusses the properties of stylized U.S. ("U-type") and Japanese tournaments ("J-type"), which can both solve the unverifiability problem of labor contracts. Under a zero-profit condition, both tournament types will yield first-best efforts if workers are homogenous and risk neutral....

In this paper, we combine the strategic delegation approach of Fershtman-Judd-Sklivas with contets. The results show that besides a symmetric equilibrium there also exist asymmetric equilibria in which one owner induces pure sales maximization to his manager so that all the other firms drop out...

According to New Institutional Economics, two or more individuals will found an organization, if it leads to a benefit compared to market allocation. A natural consequence will then be internal rent seeking. We discuss the interrelation between profits, rent seeking and the foundation of...

In this paper we deal with voluntary and compulsory redistribution in an economy where the enforcement of property rights is costly. Two agents engage in a common-pool contest and two types of potential distortions arise: the waste of resources in the contest and the dilution of incentives to...

Many information structures generate correlated rather than mutually independent signals, the news media being a prime example. This paper shows experimentally that in such context many people neglect these correlations in the updating process and treat correlated information as independent. In...

Two players bargain over the allocation of a sum of money. They are only incompletely informed about the opponent's alternative in case of conflict. The paper investigates two different experimental approaches: the spontaneous behavior of subjects in a game playing experiment and the strategies...

On the basis of experimental evidence reported in the literature the paper draws conclusions about the bounded rationality exhibited by human economic behaviour. Among the topics discussed are presentation effects caused by superficial analysis, strategic reasoning and strategy construction...