Following recent empirical evidence which indicates the importance of rank for the determination of workers’ wellbeing, this paper introduces status seeking preferences in the form of rank-dependent utility functions into a moral hazard framework with one firm and multiple workers, but no...

This paper studies the dominance-solvability (by iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies) of plurality rule voting games. For K 3 alternatives and n 3 voters, we find sufficient conditions for the game to be dominance-solvable (DS) and not to be DS. These conditions can be stated in...

This paper investigates whether tax competition can survive under tax coordination, when information is private or nonverifiable. WE focus on a two-jurisdiction model where capital can move across borders, and where jurisdictions have different public goods requirements, but are otherwise...

In this paper we study interactions between labor and product markets, in an imperfectly competitive industry with centralized wage bargaining. Firms jointly bargain with the union over wages and then compete in prices or quantities. We show that the bargained wage is independent of the firms,...

Protests take place for a variety of reasons. In this paper we focus on protests that have a well defined objective, that is in conflict with the objectives of the government. Hence the success or failure of a protest movement depends crucially on how the government responds. We assume that...

This paper compares default incentives in competitive sovereign debt markets when leaders can be either democratically elected or dictators. When leaders can be replaced as in democracies, the incentives for repayment are mainly the ego rents from office and the possibility of getting a corrupt...

In a classic model of tax competition, we show that the level of public good provision and taxation in a Nash equilibrium can be efficient or inefficient with either too much, or too little public good provision. The key is whether there exists a unilateral incentive to deviate from the...

Many firms have more than one blockholder, but finance theory suggests that one blockholder should be sufficient to bestow all benefits on a firm that arise from concentrated ownership. This paper identifies a reason why more blockholders may arise endogenously. We consider a setting where...

Both complete and incomplete game Theoretic Models of Voter Turnout (Palfrey and Rosenthal, 1983,1985) have the problem of multiple equilibria, some of which seem unreasonable. How can the counter intuitive high turnout equilibria be explained? Palfrey and Rosenthal (1985) suggest that the main...

We examine how institutions that enforce contracts between two parties, producers and consumers, interact in a competitive market with one-sided asymmetric information and productivity shocks. We compare an informal enforcement mechanism, reputation, the efficacy of which is enhanced by...