We study a variant of the multi-candidate Hotelling-Downs model that recognizes that politicians, even after declaring candidacy, have the option of withdrawing from the electoral contest before the election date and saving the cost of continuing campaign. We find that this natural variant...

This article characterizes the conditions under which holdout (i.e. bargaining inefficiency) may, or may not be significant in a two-sided, one-buyer-many-seller model with complementarity. Our central result is that the severity of holdout (i.e. inefficiency) is critically dependent on three...