At the start of their term, politicians often announce which issue they intend to address. To shed light on this agenda setting, we develop a model in which a politician has to decide whether or not to address a public issue. Addressing an issue means that the politician investigates the issue...

Traditional point views the success of coup as the shifting of focal point from supporting dictator to supporting coup plotter, which cannot be rationalized. When we look at coup's micro-process, we find that it is rationalizable. In this paper, I propose a model of coup with unique sub-game...

Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision such as Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, Hirohito's government launching a war against the United States, or Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even if the decision is not ultimately fatal for the...

We propose a political economy mechanism that explains the presence of fiscal regimes punctuated by crisis periods. Our model focuses on the interaction between successive deficit-biased governments subject to i.i.d. fiscal shocks. We show that the economy transitions between a fiscally...

I consider a stopping game between two players, where observations related to an unknown state of the nature arrive at random. Players not only learn from observing each other, but their payoffs also depend on the presence of the counterpart. I derive a general characterization of an equilibrium...

We consider the problem of maximizing portfolio value when an agent has a subjective view on asset value which differs from the traded market price. The agent's trades will have a price impact which affect the price at which the asset is traded. In addition to the agent's trades affecting the...

Models of choice where agents see others as less sophisticated than themselves have significantly different, sometimes more accurate, predictions in games than does Nash equilibrium. When it comes to mechanism design, however, they turn out to have surprisingly similar implications. This paper...

Whom should an interest group lobby in a legislature? I develop a model of informational lobbying in which a legislature must decide on the allocation of a local publicly-provided good across districts. An interest group chooses sequentially to search and provide information on districts'...

We present a theoretical explanation of inefficient early matching in matching markets. Our explanation is based on strategic complementarities and strategic unraveling. We identify a negative externality imposed on the rest of the market by agents who make early offers. As a consequence, an...