This paper studies the Markov perfect equilibrium outcomes of a dynamic game of electoral competition between two policy-motivated parties. I model incumbent policy persistence: parties commit to implement a policy for their full tenure in office, and hence in any election only the opposition...

Electoral systems promote strategic voting and aect party systems. Duverger (1951) proposed that plurality rule leads to bi-partyism and proportional representation leads to multi-partyism. We show that in a dynamic setting, these static eects also lead to a higher option value for existing...

In standard models of experimentation, the costs of project development consist of (a) the direct cost of running trials as well as (b)the implicit opportunity cost of leaving alternative projects idle. Another natural type of experimentation cost, the cost of holding on to the option of...

I model the dynamic agency relationship underlying prevention. In each period, a principal can transfer resources to an agent that has private information about a problem, which the agent can direct to solving the problem or divert into rents. Problems are persistent and rectifiable: they...

This paper studies the symmetric equilibria of a two-buyer, two-seller model of directed search in which sellers commit to information provision. More informed buyers have better differentiated private valuations and extract higher rents from trade.When sellers cannot commit to sale mechanisms,...

In this paper, we develop a general view of regulation as a set of constraints imposed on market transactions by a welfare-maximizing authority. We present a novel frictional search model with horizontal differentiation and nontransferable utility in which a regulator determines the set of...

We establish existence and continuity properties of equilibria in a model of dynamic elections with a discrete (countable) state space and general policies and preferences. We provide conditions under which there is a representative voter in each state, and we give characterization results in...