Merged firms are typically rather complex organizations. Accordingly, me rger has a more profound effect on the structure of a market than simply reducing the number of competitors. We show that this may render horizontal mergers profitable and welfare – improving even if costs are linear. The...

We study the role of information exchange through alliances in a framework with contestants who have binding budget limits and know their own budget limit but are incompletely informed about other contestants' budget limits. First, we solve for the Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Then we consider the...

This paper analyzes the role of narrowly selfish and other-regarding preferences for the median voter in a Meltzer-Richard (1981) framework. We use computerized and real human co-players to distinguish between these sets of motivations. Redistribution to real co-players has a negative effect on...

We investigate redistributive taxation in a political economy experiment and determine how different patterns of social mobility affect the choices of redistributional taxes. In the absence of social mobility, voters choose tax rates that are very well in line with the prediction derived in the...

Countries differ in their governmental architectures and in the rules that describe the allocation of tasks, rights and duties across the various levels of government. In this paper, we present a short and selective survey of the development of the theory of optimal allocation of rights and...

This paper surveys some of the strategic aspects that emerge if players fight in an alliance against an enemy. The survey includes the free-rider problem and the hold-up problem that emerges in the baseline model, the role of supermodularity in alliance members' effort contributions, the role of...

We analyze bargaining over international climate agreements in a setting with incomplete information about abatement costs. Unilateral commitment to high abatement reduces the gains from global cooperation. This reduces the probability of reaching efficient international environmental agreements.

We study the explanatory role of fundamentals versus the effects of nation brands for the size of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Using the EUROSTAT data on FDI flows we find that the Anholt Nation Brands Index has a significant and strong impact on FDI flows in a multi-variate analysis...

We study an all-pay contest with multiple identical prizes (lifeboat seats). Prizes are partitioned into subsets of prizes (lifeboats). Players play a two-stage game. First, each player chooses an element of the partition (a lifeboat). Then each player competes for a prize in the subset chosen...

We analyze the incidence and welfare effects of unit sales taxes in experimental monopoly and Bertrand markets. We find, in line with economic theory, that firms with no market power are able to shift a high share of a tax burden on to consumers, independent of whether buyers are automated or...