We study the strategic interaction between a decision maker who needs to take a binary decision but is uncertain about relevant facts and an informed expert who can send a message to the decision maker but has a preference over the decision. We show that the probability that the expert can...

Recent research on the Condorcet Jury Theorem has proven that informative voting (that is, voting according to one’s signal) is not necessarily rational. With two alternatives, rational voting typically leads to the election of the correct alternative, in spite of the fact that not all voters...

We prove that the maximal bid in asymmetric first-price and all-pay auctions is the same for all bidders. Our proof is elementary, and does not require that bidders are risk neutral, or that the distribution functions of their valuations are independent or smooth.

We consider two-player, perfectly discriminatory, common-value contests (or all-pay auctions), in which one player knows the value of the contested object with certainty, and the other knows only its prior distribution. We show, among other things, that in equilibrium the players win with equal...

We establish the effort-maximizing rule of allocating heterogeneous prizes when contestants privately observe their effort efficiencies. With ex ante symmetric players and increasing virtual effort efficiency, an all pay auction maximizes the total expected effort.

Greater media presence may facilitate information transmission and consensus or amplify existing political differences. In the OECD greater media penetration is strongly correlated with reduced ideological polarization. Media penetration increases lead reductions in polarization, suggesting that...

An alternative is a Condorcet winner if it beats all other alternatives in a pairwise majority vote. A social choice correspondence is a Condorcet extension if it selects the Condorcet winners–and nothing else–whenever a Condorcet winner exists. It is well known that Condorcet extensions are...

We show that even when voters’ preferences are deterministic and known optimal partisan redistricting is not generally obtained by concentrating opponent’s supporters in “unwinnable” districts (“packing”) and spreading one’s own supporters evenly among the other districts in order...

We show that voters are fiscal conservatives, although in the long run only: while the average (over the mandate) level of debt has a negative impact on the probability of reelection, pre-election debt accumulation by incumbents increases their probability of reelection. As the negative impact...

We analyze equilibria of two-player contests where players have intention-based preferences. We find that players invest more effort compared to the case with selfish preferences and are even willing to exert effort when the monetary value of the prize converges to zero. As a consequence,...