We consider a (pure) public goods provision problem with voluntary participation in a quasi-linear economy. We propose a new hybrid solution concept, the free-riding-proof core (FRP-Core), which endogenously determines a contribution group, public goods provision level, and how to share the...

This paper proposes a tractable model of a dynamic contest where players have private information about the contest's prize. We show that private information helps to encourage players who have fallen behind, leading to an increase in aggregate incentives. We derive the optimal information...

Szidarovszky and Okuguchi (Games and Economic Behavior, 1997) have provided useful conditions for the existence of a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in rent-seeking games of complete information. In this paper, we generalize their results to contests with incomplete informa tion. Two...

We investigate optimal favoritism using identity-contingent prizes in a two-player Tullock model. Besides the usual balance effect, prize allocation has an extra efficiency effect: One additional unit of prize tends to induce more effort, if it is used as the winning prize for the stronger...

We study signaling in dynamic contests with heterogeneous players. A privately-informed challenger faces a sequence of rivals of known types. The type of future rivals determines which signal the challenger wants to produce, whereas the strategic response of current rivals determines the extent...

In this note I give a full characterization of all deterministic direct mechanisms in the public good provision problem with independent private values that are dominant strategy incentive compatible, ex-post individually rational, and ex-post budget balanced.

We study a situation where, as a consequence of private information, agents do not have the incentive to invest in a public good if they are unable to have prior discussion with their partners. We show that in a voluntary contribution mechanism with cheap talk, any finite message space does not...

Consider a mechanism for the binary public good provision problem that is dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), ex-post individually rational (EPIR), and ex-post budget balanced (EPBB). Suppose this mechanism has the additional property that the utility from participating in the...

We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...