A woman assessing the wealth of a potential husband may observe some, but not all, of his wealth. She may screen, leading to status consumption and wasteful gift giving. The screening activity is costly not only for the potential husband, but also for the woman, as it reduces the wealth of the...

We examine an endogenous, sunk budget extension of Myerson's (1993) two-candidate model of political competition in which candidates simultaneously allocate an exogenous level of a use-it-or-lose-it persuasive advertising resource across a homogeneous electorate of unit measure. We completely...

This paper studies the attack-and-defence game between a web user and a whole set of players over this user's ‘valuable secrets.' The number and type of these valuable secrets are the user's private information. Attempts to tap information as well as privacy protection are costly. The...

This paper considers evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) in a take-it-or-leave-it offer bargaining game with incomplete information. We find responders reject offers which yield a higher positive material payoff than their outside option. Proposers, in turn, make more attractive offers than...

A woman assessing the wealth of a potential husband may observe some, but not all, of his wealth. She may screen, leading to status consumption and wasteful gift giving. The screening activity is costly both for the potential husband, and for the woman, as it reduces the wealth of the man she...

This paper compares education investment in closed and open economies without government and with a benevolent government. The fact that the time consistency problem in taxation can make labor mobility beneficial even if governments are fully benevolent - which is known from other contexts - is...

This paper considers education investment and public education subsidies in closed and open economies with an extortionary government. The extortionary government in a closed economy has incentives to subsidize education in order to overcome a hold-up problem of time consistent taxation, similar...

Incomplete information is a commitment device for time consistency problems. In the context of time consistent labor income taxation privacy can lead to a Pareto superior outcome and increases the effectiveness of public education as a second best policy.

We consider redistributional taxation between people with and without human capital if education is endogenous and if individuals differ in their perceptions about own ability. Those who see their ability as low like redistributive taxation because of the transfers it generates. Those who see...

Restrictions on work hours are more important in countries with a large welfare state. We show that this empirical observation is consistent with the strategic effects of such restrictions in a welfare state in the context of optimal direct taxation in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Our...