Collective action is a dynamic process where individuals in a group assess over time the benefits and costs of participating toward the success of a collective goal. Early participation improves the expectation of success and thus stimulates the subsequent participation of other individuals who...

Permit markets are celebrated as a policy instrument since they allow (i) firms to equalize marginal costs through trade and (ii) the regulator to distribute the burden in a politically desirable way. These two concerns, however, may conflict in a dynamic setting. Anticipating the regulator's...

The liturgical system in Classical Athens (479-322 BCE) privately provided public goods, including naval defense. I use it to evaluate mechanism design policies and to address uncertainties in the historical record by adding predictive economic theory to research by ancient historians. I...

This paper theoretically investigates the strategic implications of varying reliability of bargaining partners under unanimous and non-unanimous voting. Three players (one proposer, two responders) bargain over the distribution of a pie. One responder has private information about his valuation...

Early results on the emptiness of the core and the majority-rule-chaos results led to the recognition of the importance of modeling institutional details in political processes. A sample of the literature on game-theoretic models of political phenomena that ensued is presented. In the case of...

Smallholder agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is largely exposed to pervasive market failures, translating into missed opportunities and sub-optimal economic behavior. These failures can partly be traced to the importance of economies of scale in procuring inputs and marketing produce, where...

This chapter surveys the past applications of game theory to the study of terrorism. By capturing the strategic interplay between terrorists and targeted governments, game theory is an appropriate methodology for investigating terrorism and counterterrorism. Game theory has been used to examine...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

We consider a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests with privately informed players. We show that findings by Athey (2001) imply the existence of a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in monotone pure strategies.