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...

We consider a finite economy with men and women. The agents have status concerns such that when a particular agent has k agents of the same type below him/her in the income distribution, he/she gets utility kA, where A0, from status. Acquiring income is costly and once the income distribution is...

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...