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 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...

It is widely believed that the English auction is solved after the dominated strategies are eliminated. This opinion is formally confirmed only for one "ascending clock" auction and can not be generalized for most other English auctions. In this paper I show that the formal argument which is...

We consider second-price and first-price auctions in the symmetric independent private values framework. We modify the standard model by the assumption that the bidders have reference-based utility, where a publicly announced reserve price has some influence on the reference point. It turns out...

This paper examines strategic trade policy with unilateral intervention under asymmetric information about market demand. In an international Cournot-duopoly, the choice of the domestic country's export subsidy signals the domestic country's private information to the foreign firm. It is shown...