A main goal of affirmative action (AA) policies is to enable disadvantaged groups to compete with their privileged counterparts. Existing theoretical and empirical research documents that incorporating AA can result in both more egalitarian outcomes and higher exerted efforts. However, the...

We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...

We investigate situations in which players make costly contributions as group members in a group conflict, and at the same time engage in contest with fellow group members to appropriate the possible reward. We introduce within group power asymmetry and complementarity in members' efforts, and...

We investigate overlapping contests in multi-divisional organizations in which an individual's effort simultaneously determines the outcome of several contests on different hierarchical levels. We show that individuals in smaller units are advantaged in the grand (organization-wide) contest for...

We model the dynamic contest between two players as a game of tug-of-war with a Tullock contest success function (CSF). We show that (pure strategy) Markov perfect equilibrium of this game exists, and it is unique. In this equilibrium - in stark contrast to a model of tug-of-war with an all pay...

A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases performance of contestants because of the “discouragement effect.” Leveling the playing field by favoring weaker contestants through bid-caps and favorable tie-breaking rules can reduce the...

A main goal of affirmative action (AA) policies is to enable disadvantaged groups to compete with their privileged counterparts. Existing theoretical and empirical research documents that incorporating AA can result in both more egalitarian outcomes and higher exerted efforts. However, the...

We model the dynamic contest between two players as a game of tug-of-war with a Tullock contest success function (CSF). We show that (pure strategy) Markov perfect equilibrium of this game exists, and it is unique. In this equilibrium - in stark contrast to a model of tug-of-war with an all pay...

This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax reforms. The conditions can be expressed as sufficient statistics and have a wide range of potential applications in public finance. We discuss one such application in detail: the introduction of...

We investigate experimentally the effects of information about native/immigrant identity, and the ability to communicate a self-chosen personal characteristic towards the rival on conflict behavior. In a two-player individual contest with British and Immigrant subjects in the UK we find that...