We study the formation of government policy in democracies when turnout depends on party activists and campaign spending ‐ parties’ ‘political capital’. The functional importance of political capital determines equilibrium rent-seeking in government. Often the more potent political...

This paper applies a utilitarian analysis to corporate political donations. Unlike the more common rights-based analyses, it is argued that the optimal policy is the one that best satisfies society’s rational preferences concerning donor influence, adequate financing, donor pressure and the...

Whether there should be transparency in political finance? Whether there should be a control over the money that the political parties are receiving?

Ronald Coase’s <CitationRef CitationID="CR8">1974</CitationRef> article on lighthouses and the Trinity House case, in particular, has triggered extensive debate on the notion of a public good, but also on the possibility of private production of public goods. The resultant literature has discussed the concept of private property and the...</citationref>

We show that the optimal prize structure of symmetric n-player Tullock tournaments assigns the entire prize pool to the winner, provided that a symmetric pure strategy equilibrium exists. If such an equilibrium fails to exist under the winner-take-all structure, we construct the optimal prize...

This article considers an asymmetric contest with incomplete information. There are two types of players: informed and uninformed. Each player has a different ability to translate effort into performance in terms of the contest success function. While one player’s type is known to both...

Joseph Heath lumps in quotas and protectionist measures with cartelization, taking advantage of information asymmetries, seeking a monopoly position, and so on, as all instances of behavior that can lead to market failures in his market failures approach to business ethics. The problem is that...

This paper examines renegotiation design in contracts for outsourced information technology (IT) services. Whereas prior literature in information systems has highlighted the likelihood of ex post rent seeking engendered by renegotiation, we build upon literature on incomplete contracts to posit...

This paper revisits the issue of law enforcement and the design of monetary sanctions when the public law enforcer's incentives depart from those of a benevolent authority, which is the most frequent assumption made in the literature on crime deterrence. We …rst consider the case of an elected...