Cheating such as corruption and tax evasion is prevalent in the developing world; therefore, many interventions have been undertaken to reduce cheating in developing countries. Although some field evidence shows that poverty is correlated with cheating, the causal effect of poverty on cheating in...

We study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters elect one of the candidates, effectively choosing between the two policies...

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....

We consider collective choice from two alternatives. Ex-ante, each agent is uncertain about which alternative she prefers, and may be uncertain about the intensity of her preferences. An environment is given by a probability distribution over utility vectors that is symmetric across agents and...

In a seminal paper, Grossman and Helpman (1994) introduced a framework to understand how lobbying influences the choice of import/export tariffs. In this paper we extend their analysis and assume that lobbies have private information to analyze the effects of information transmission in a...

Psychologists claim that being treated kindly puts individuals in a positive emotional state: they then treat an unrelated third party more kindly. Numerous experiments document that subjects indeed ‘pay forward’ specific behavior. For example, they are less generous after having experienced...

Páscoa and Seghir (2009) presented two examples to show that in the presence of utility penalties for default, collateral requirements do not always eliminate the occurrence of Ponzi schemes and equilibria may fail to exist. This paper aims at providing a counterexample to their claim. We show...

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 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 examine implications of a society's cultural emphasis on moral sentiments. Entrepreneurs and investors interact in a game that entails both adverse selection and moral hazard; entrepreneurs may attempt to breach their contracts and expropriate investors. An agent is born into a particular...