Prior research on 'strategic voting' has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...

Through a series of decision tasks involving colored cards, we provide separate measures of Bayesian updating and non-probabilistic reasoning skills. We apply these measures to (and are the first to study) a common-value Dutch auction. This format is more salient than the strategically...

It is shown that rent-seeking contests with continuous and independent type distributions possess a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium.

A recent decision of the German Constitutional Court requires political decision makers to revise the system of intergovernmental transfers in order to limit free bargaining among state and federal government officials. The present paper provides empirical support for the thesis that political...

This paper provides a statistical analysis of the attitudes towards foreigners displayed by European citizens. It is found that, holding other things constant, unemployed Europeans do not have more negative attitudes towards foreigners than the employed. On the other hand, an increased...

The "revolving door" phenomenon has become very common in most industrialised countries, and is leading to conflicts of interest as well as economic distortions. The purpose of this paper is to develop an indicator of the distortionary effects of the revolving door - The Revolving Door Indicator...

I show that the weather condition on election day affects future fiscal policy. When it rains during state elections, there is an increase in the relative income of voters, which is followed by an increase in expenditure and debt. The increase in expenditure is directed towards a larger police...

The negative impact of EU biofuel policy on the agricultural markets, carbon emissions and global land use has been evidenced through many studies. Besides the often affirmed negative implications, the paper suggests that in countries targeted by land investments for biofuel production, there...

We analyse the all-pay auction with incomplete information and variance-averse bidders. We characterise the symmetric equilibrium for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders. Variance aversion is a sufficient assumption to predict that high-valuation bidders increase their...

We develop the idea of using mean-variance preferences for the analysis of the first-price, all-pay auction. On the bidding side, we characterise the optimal strategy in symmetric all-pay auctions under mean-variance preferences for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders....