Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

Veto institutions are often dominated by government opponents with rival electoral and policy interests (e.g. \divided government"). I investigate the tradeoff between policy control and policy blockade when both the government and the veto party may cater to opposing special interests. The...

This paper analyzes truthtelling incentives in pre-vote communication in heterogeneous committees. We generalize the classical Condorcet jury model by introducing a new informational structure that captures consistency of information. In contrast to the impossibility result shown by Coughlan...

Dictatorship is the predominant political system in many developing countries. However, different dictators act quite differently: a good dictator implements growth-enhancing economic policies, e.g. investment in public education and infrastructure, whereas a bad dictator expropriates wealth of...

The paper addresses the problem of optimally matching heterogeneous players in a two-stage two-type Lazear-Rosen tournament in which the semifinal losers are eliminated. The organizer of the tournament can either choose two homogeneous semifinals -- one between two strong players and the other...

Participants of dynamic competition games may prefer to play with the rules of the game by systematically withholding e¤ort in the beginning. Such behavior is referred to as sandbagging. I consider a two-period con- test between heterogeneous players and analyze potential sandbagging of...

We show that in competitive careers based on individual performance the least productive individuals may have the highest probabilities to be promoted to top positions. These individuals have the lowest fall-back positions and, hence, the highest incentives to succeed in career contests. This...

The German federal government intends to introduce regular staff rotation as a precautionary measure against corruption in public administrations. To test the effectiveness of this instrument, we conduct an experiment using the bribery game by Abbink, Irlenbusch, and Renner (1999), in which...

This paper uses the Hotelling-Downs spatial model of electoral competition between candidates to explore competition between political parties. Two parties choose platforms in a unidimensional policy space, and then in a continuum of constituencies with different median voters candidates from...

In innovation contests, the progress of the competing firms in the innovation process is usually their private information. We analyze an innovation contest in which research firms have a stochastic technology to develop innovations at a fixed cost, but their progress is publicly announced. We...