From the regulation of sports to lawmaking in parliament, in many situations one group of people (“agents”) make decisions that affect the payoffs of others (“principals”) who may offer action-contingent transfers in order to sway the agents' decisions. Prat and Rustichini (2003)...

We study how aggregate effort exerted in contests between groups of heterogeneous players depends on the sorting of players into groups. We show that the optimal sorting depends on the curvature of the effort cost function. From the perspective of a contest organizer whose objective is to...

This paper introduces a model of electoral competition in which candidates select policies and voters are then exposed to arguments in favor of the policies. Voters update their beliefs about their own private preferences after listening to arguments and then vote in the election. I show that...

We show that the Shapley–Shubik power index on the domain of simple (voting) games can be uniquely characterized without the efficiency axiom. In our axiomatization, the efficiency is replaced by the following weaker requirement that we term the gain-loss axiom: any gain in power by a player...

Although simple games are very useful in modeling decision-making bodies, they allow each voter only two choices: to support or oppose a measure. This restriction ignores that voters often can abstain from voting, which is effectively different from the other two options. Following the approach...

This paper analyzes the ability of group members to cooperate in rent-seeking activities in a context of between-group competition. For this purpose, we develop an infinitely repeated rent-seeking game between two groups of different size. We first investigate Nash reversion strategies to...

We allow a contest organizer to bias a contest in a discriminatory way; i.e., she can favor specific contestants by designing the contest rule in order to maximize total equilibrium effort (resp. revenue). The two predominant contest regimes are considered, all-pay auctions and lottery contests....

I consider a model in which candidates of differing quality must win a primary election to compete in the general election. I show that there is an equilibrium in which Democrats choose liberal policies and Republicans choose conservative policies, but higher quality candidates choose more...

When members of a voting body exhibit single peaked preferences, pair-wise majority voting equilibria (Condorcet winners) always exist. Moreover, they coincide with the median(s) of the votersʼ most preferred alternatives. This important fact is known as the median voter result. Variants of it...

We propose a smooth multibidding mechanism for environments where a group of agents have to choose one out of several projects. Our proposal is related to the multibidding mechanism (Pérez-Castrillo and Wettstein, 2002) but it is “smoother” in the sense that small variations in an agentʼs...