Private provision of public goods often takes place as a war of attrition: individuals wait until someone else volunteers and provides the good. After a certain time period, however, one individual may be randomly selected. If the individuals are uncertain about their cost of provision, but can...

Centralized sanctioning institutions are of utmost importance for overcoming free-riding tendencies and enforcing outcomes that maximize group welfare in social dilemma situations. However, little is known about how such institutions come into existence. In this paper we investigate, both...

We present a model where firms make competitive decisions about the optimal duration (or time to build) of their R&D projects. Choosing its project's duration, the firm can choose to become a leader or a follower, based on its R&D efficiency, the size of the R&D to be carried out and the degree...

Most analyses of the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms focus on the cost effectiveness of "where" flexibility (e.g. by showing that mitigation costs are lower in a global permit market than in regional markets or in permit markets confined to Annex 1 countries). Less attention has been devoted to...

This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a...

We set out a model of production and appropriation involving many players, who differ with respect to both resource endowments and productivities. We write down the model in a novel way that permits our analysis to avoid the proliferation of dimensions associated with the best response function...

This paper characterizes geometrically the set of all Nash equilibrium payoffs achievable with unmediated communication in persuasion games, i.e., games with an informed expert and an uninformed decisionmaker in which the expert's information is certifiable. The first equilibrium...

We consider a sequential game in which one player produces a public good and the other player can influence this decision by making an unconditional transfer. An efficient allocation requires the Lindahl property: the sum of the two (implicit) individual prices has to be equal to the resource...

This paper examines the chance of winning a Tullock-contest when participants differ in both their talent and their attitude towards risk. For the case of CARA preferences, it is shown that the winning probability may be higher for a low-skilled agent with a low degree of risk aversion than for...

We study Downsian competition in a Mirrleesian model of income taxation. The competing politicians may differ in competence. If politicians engage in vote-share maximization, the less competent politician's policy proposals are attractive to the minority of rich agents, whereas those of the...