Asymmetric information plays an important role in markets and politics. When parties are asymmetrically informed and have misaligned preferences, they may be hurt by adverse selection. By contrast, if parties know that their preferences are aligned, they may benefit from advantageous selection....

This paper develops a dynamic model of legislative policy making with evolving, privately observed policy preferences. Our goal is to find conditions under which decision rules, which assign feasible policies based on the legislators' preferences, are sustainable in the long run. We show that...

Reputation concerns of politicians sometimes force them to implement biased policies. We study the effect of reputation (i.e., reelection) concerns on taxation in the age of globalization. To this end, we construct a two-country asymmetric tax competition model in which the residents in one of...

We study two all-pay auctions, where contestants cannot compete in both auctions. One contest has a higher prize than the other. Ideally, high-ability contestants should participate in the contest with a higher prize. We find that this is not necessarily the case. We show that the top contestant...

This paper analyzes the role of yardstick competition for improving political decisions. We examine how performance comparisons across jurisdictions affect the agency problem resulting from uncertainty about politicians (adverse selection) and their policies (moral hazard). We study two forms of...

This paper provides a selective review of the theoretical literature on delegated portfolio management as a principal-agent relationship. The main focus of the paper is to review the analytical issues raised by the peculiar nature of the delegated portfolio management relationship within the...

We develop a test for adverse selection and use it to examine private health insurance markets. In contrast to earlier papers that consider a purely private system or a system in which private insurance supplements a public system, we focus our attention on a system where privately funded health...

In this paper we analyse several measures which are typically included in a social security reform: a cut in the social security benefits, an increase in the social security tax and tax incentives for the purchase of private life annuities, which have recently become quite popular at the...