We develop a model in which profits of media firms depend on their audience ratings, and maximizing profits may involve catering to a partisan audience by suppressing information that the partisan audience does not like hearing. While voters are rational, understand the nature of the news...

Many observers argue that political polarization, particularly on social and cultural issues, has increased in the United States. How does this influence the political competition on economic issues? We analyze this question using a framework in which two officemotivated candidates differ in...

We introduce a model of electoral competition with office-motivated candidates who are exogenously committed to particular positions on some issues, while they choose positions for the remaining issues. A position is majority-efficient if a candidate cannot make a majority of the electorate...

One of the most widely discussed phenomena in American politics today is the perceived increasing partisan divide that splits the U.S. electorate. A contested question is whether this diagnosis is actually true and, if so, what the underlying cause might be. We propose a new method that...

How should we evaluate the welfare implications of improvements to safety technologies in the presence of offsetting behavior? We model this problem as a symmetric game in which each player’s payoff depends on his own action and the average action of the other players, and analyze under which...

This paper is concerned with the effects of regulations that prohibit the use of information to risk-rate premiums in a life insurance market. In particular, new information derived from genetic tests is likely to become very relevant in the near to medium term future. Many governments have...

We analyze the optimal timing problem of an agenda setter who can propose a project that is then voted on by a committee. The payoff consists of a common stochastic component and an idiosyncratic component that differs among committee members. The agenda setter may be biased for or against the...