Government or company decisions on whom to hire or whom to give a contract are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resource and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is...

We argue that anti-corruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anticorruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining...

Government or company decisions on whom to hire are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resources and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts or positions that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is ruled out,...

Government or company decisions on whom to hire or whom to give a contract are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resource and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is...

We argue that anti-corruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of non-ideological political nominations. Anti-corruption laws forbid trade in nominations made by politicians. However, citizens may pay for gaining access to...

Anti-corruption laws forbid selling nominations to public jobs. Even if bribing is ruled out, those interested in the nominations may invest in good relationships with the nominators. This provides a legal way to influence the decision. Such networking is costly, however. Thus, rent-seeking...

We offer a tractable model of tough negotiations and delayed agreement. The setting is an infinite horizon bilateral bargaining game in which negotiators can make strategic commitments to durable offers. Commitments decay stochastically, but uncommitted negotiators can make new commitments. The...

Building on previous work by Schelling and Crawford, we study a model of bilateral bargaining in which negotiators can make binding commitments at a low positive cost c. Most of our results concern outcomes that survive iterated strict dominance. If commitment attempts never fail, there are...

Experiments suggest that communication increases the contribution to public goods (Ledyard, 1995). There is also evidence that, when contemplating a lie, people trade off their private benefit from the lie with the harm it inflicts on others (Gneezy, 2005). We develop a model of bilateral...