Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of...

An interesting aspect of corruption is that its damaging effects on economic performance differ significantly across countries. In this paper, we show that if a central government collects sufficient taxes, it can curtail corruption by paying for performance of local government officials. An...

Envy is evident when an agent undertakes a costly effort to reduce the gap between his situation and the envied others' situation. This attempt can take two paths. An agent characterized by competitive or white envy is willing to incur a cost in order to keep up with the Joneses' situation. An...

Using an original database concerning 1637 French local public authorities in 2001, we explore the relationships between prices charged by private operators in water contracts and ex post competition. We show that prices charged in contracts, in which operators are in a monopoly situation...

Using an original database concerning 1637 French local public authorities in 2001, we explore the relationships between prices charged by private operators in water contracts and ex post competition. We show that prices charged in contracts, in which operators are in a monopoly situation...

When candidates from two groups compete for admission to college, we show that a college maximizes the test scores of its incoming class by adopting an admissions rule that favors the weaker group. Such "handicapping" of the weaker group increases competition and induces both groups to invest...

The motivation for this work is examine federal election competitiveness over time at both the national and state level. At the national level we seek a means to quantify competitiveness in a way that allows comparison between presidential elections and majority control of Congress. At the state...

In this paper, we analyze the equilibrium amount of entertainment in news coverage of newspapers and television stations. We find that a shift in the inclination to read, expressed by a shift in the (psychological) distance costs, induces both media outlets to incorporate more entertaining...

We study the strategic disclosure of demand information and product-market strategies of duopolists. In a setting where both firms receive information with some probability, we show that firms selectively disclose information in equilibrium in order to influence their competitorś product-market...

The objective of our paper is to study R&D investments and pricing behavior in an environment with fundamental uncertainty. We designed a multi-period experiment in which each period consisted of two stages, an R&D phase and a pricing stage. Participants in the experiment had almost no...