We analyse procurement auctions in which sellers are distinguished on the basis of the ratios of quality per unit of money that they offer. Sellers are privately informed on the offered quality of the technology or good. We assume that the procurer cannot perfectly identify the best offer. Thus,...

We analyse procurement auctions in which sellers are distinguished on the basis of the ratios of quality per unit of money that they offer. Sellers are privately informed on the offered quality of the technology or good. We assume that the procurer cannot perfectly identify the best offer. Thus,...

We use a simple balanced budget contest to collect taxes on a private good in order to ?nance a pure public good. We show that-with an appropriately chosen structure of winning probabilities-this contest can provide the public good efficiently and without distorting private consumption. We...

We study decision making processes with non-standard all-pay structures. In our first group of applications, individual members of some institution—due to public pressure or expectation—propose reductions of their own income, e.g., corporate board members reducing their bonus payments in an...

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 analyse a procurement auction in which sellers are distinguished on the basis of the ratios of quality per unit of money they offer. Sellers are privately informed on the quality of the technology or good they offer. We assume that the procurer cannot perfectly identify the best offer. Thus,...

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 allpay auctions under mean-variance preferences for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders....

Decision-making processes are studied using non-standard all-pay structures. Our interest is motivated by regulatory, political, legal, military, and economic applications in which individual actions determine the consequences for a larger group or the general public. The common features of...

We revisit the classical result that taxation of private consumption is distortionary and therefore precludes the efficient provision of public goods. We introduce a nonlinear consumption tax which we call a ‘tax lottery’. Under this scheme, an ad-valorem consumption tax is supplemented with...