Why do absolutists decentralize power to others? We developed a signaling game model to analyze the decentralization under an authoritarian regime. The model reveals that strong rulers prefer to not offer any power decentralization, while weak rulers tend to disguise themselves as strong rulers...

Treaty shopping refers to a situation in which an individual or a company that is not eligible for the benefits of a tax treaty uses an intermediary entity that is eligible for such benefits to obtain these benefits indirectly. This paper examines treaty shopping with a game-theoretic model in a...

We establish the precise connections between progressive taxation and inequality reduction, in a setting where the level of tax revenue to be raised is endogenously fixed and tax schemes are balanced. We show that, in contrast with the traditional literature on taxation, the equivalence between...

We establish the precise connections between progressive taxation and inequality reduction, in a setting where the level of tax revenue to be raised is exogenously fixed and tax schemes are balanced. We show that, in contrast with the traditional literature on taxation, the equivalence between...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

This Article explains how MLB club-owners use their control over the market for premier, professional baseball to demand free public stadiums. Part I of this Article explains how the United States has moved from having just one publicly funded MLB stadium (pre-1950s) to having over twenty-five...

Progressivity, inequality reduction and merging-proofness are three well-known axioms in taxation. We investigate implications of each of the three axioms through characterizations of several families of taxation rules and their logical relations. We also study the preservation of these axioms...

Do firms have adequate incentives to invest in anti-terrorism mechanisms? This paper develops a framework for addressing this issue when the security choices by one agent affect the risks faced by others. We utilize the airline security problem to illustrate how the incentive by one airline to...

For the trust game, recent models of belief-dependent motivations make opposite predictions regarding the correlation between back-transfers and second- order beliefs of the trustor: While reciprocity models predict a negative correlation, guilt-aversion models predict a positive one. This paper...

We study the impact of advice or observation on the depth of reasoning in an experimental beauty-contest game. Both sources of information trigger faster convergence to the equilibrium. Yet, we find that subjects who receive naïve advice outperform uninformed subjects permanently, whereas...