We study the effect of leadership on incentive contracts in a moral-hazard framework. In our model, agents are allowed to choose the timing of their actions. The agents may choose their effort levels simultaneously or sequentially. We show that relative performance evaluation leads to a subgame...

We explore how models of boundedly rational decision-making in games can explain the overdissipation of rents in laboratory Tullock contest games. Using a new series of experiments in which group size is varied across sessions, we find that models based on logit choice organize the data well. In...

We study the possibility of peace when two countries fight a war over the ownership of a resource. War is always the outcome of the game played by rational countries – under complete or asymmetric information – when there is no pre-established distribution of the resource among countries....

We study optimal punishment in an all-pay contest with endogenous entry, where the participant with the lowest performance may be punished. When a small punishment is introduced, the lowest ability players drop out and those of medium ability exert less effort, while only the highest ability...

Commitment problems are inherent to non-binding conflict resolution mechanisms, since an unsatisfied party can ignore the resolution and initiate conflict. We provide experimental evidence suggesting that even in the absence of binding contractual agreements individuals often avoid conflict by...