Publicly provided goods often create differential payoffs due to timely or spatial distances of group members. We design and test a provision mechanism which utilizes rank competition to mitigate free-riding in impure public goods. In our Rank-Order Voluntary Contribution Mechanism...

This paper presents a formal theory of reciprocity. Reciprocity means that people reward kind actions and punish unkind ones. The theory takes into account that people evaluate the kindness of an action not only by its consequences but also by the intention underlying this action. The theory...

In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians' behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We...

This paper examines the role of status acquisition as a motive for giving in voluntary contributions to public goods. In particular, every donor's status is given by the difference between his contribution and that of the other donor. Specifically, I show that contributors give more than in...

This paper presents a formal theory of reciprocity. Reciprocity means that people reward kind actions and punish unkind ones. The theory takes into account that people evaluate the kindness of an action not only by its consequences but also by the intention underlying this action. The theory...

There are situations in which competitors ally to pursue a common objective. This simultaneous presence of cooperation and competition is called coopetition and we study it theoretically and experimentally in a group contest setup. More concretely, we analyze a group contest with a new sharing...

In dynamic promotion contests, where performance measurement is noisy and ordinal, selection can be improved by biasing later stages in favor of early leaders. Even in the worst-case scenario, where noise swamps ability differences in determining relative performance, optimal bias is i) strictly...