This paper studies a collective decision problem in which a group of individuals with interdependent preferences vote whether or not to implement a public project of unknown value. A utilitarian social planner aggregates these votes according to a majority rule; but, unlike what is commonly...

We present a theory of charitable fund-raising in which it is costly to solicit donors. We fully characterize the optimal solicitation strategy that maximizes donations net of fundraising costs. The optimal strategy dictates that the fund-raiser target only those individuals whose equilibrium...

This paper investigates the sequencing choice of a buyer who negotiates with the sellers of two complementary objects with uncertain payoffs. We show that the sequencing matters to the buyer only when equilibrium trade can be inefficient. In this case, the buyer begins with the less powerful...

Evidence suggests that donors have little demand for information before giving to charity. To understand this behavior and its policy implications, we present a model in which each individual can acquire costly information about her true value of charity. We observe that an individual who...

We present a theory of strategic voting that predicts elections are more likely to be close and voter turnout is more likely to be high when citizens possess better public information about the composition of the electorate. These findings are disturbing because they suggest that providing more...

This paper studies a sequential bargaining model in which, as in the rent-seeking literature, agents expend resources to be the proposer, and agreement requires affirmative votes of either all agents or a subset of them. By focusing on the Stationary Subgame Perfect Equilibrium, it is found that...

A well-known shortcoming of rational voter models is that the equilibrium probability that an individual votes converges to zero as the population of citizens tends to infinity. We show that this does not ñ as is often suggested ñ imply that equilibrium voter turnout is insignificant in the...

This paper deals with the optimal procurement of a long term project whose full return is to be received upon completion. The project consists of several subprojects to be auctioned off in a sequence. In equilibrium, I find that: (1) Even though the procurer lacks long term commitment power,...

I examine a sequential bargaining situation in which agents compete to propose by expending (unproductive) efforts. Depending on the timing of efforts, I consider two types of "recognition" to select the proposer. Whereas "persistent" recognition refers to cases where competition to propose...

We characterize equilibria of games with two properties: (i) Agents have the opportunity to adjust their strategic variable after their initial choices and before payoffs occur; but (ii) they can only add to their initial amounts. The equilibrium set consists of just the Cournot-Nash outcome,...