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...

We study both theoretically and experimentally the set of Nash equilibria of a classical one-dimensional election game with two candidates. These candidates are interested in power and ideology, but their weights on these two motives are not necessarily identical. Apart from obtaining the well...

We study experimentally the effects of cost structure and prize allocation rules on the performance of rent-seeking contests. Most previous studies use a lottery prize rule and linear cost, and find both overbidding relative to the Nash equilibrium prediction and significant variation of...

We offer complete characterizations of the equilibrium outcomes of two prominent agenda voting institutions that are widely used in the democratic world: the amendment, also known as the Anglo-American procedure, and the successive, or equivalently the Euro-Latin procedure. Our axiomatic...

In a common-values election where voters receive a signal about which candidate is superior, suppose there is a small amount of uncertainty about the likelihood of the signal's outcome, holding fixed the correct candidate. Once this uncertainty is resolved, the signal is i.i.d. across agents....

We generalize the dynamic bargaining game of Diermeier and Fong (2011) to arbitrary quota rules to provide a non-cooperative characterization of the von Neumann–Morgenstern stable set. Assuming that players are sufficiently patient and have strict preferences, a pure-strategy stationary...

In costly voting models, voters abstain when a stochastic cost of voting exceeds the benefit from voting. In probabilistic voting models, they always vote for a candidate who generates the highest utility, which is subject to random shocks. We prove an equivalence result: In two-candidate...

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....

This paper presents a strategic model of common value elections with endogenous information acquisition. It proves that majoritarian elections can fail to aggregate information when voters have heterogeneous skills and provides necessary and sufficient conditions for information aggregation....