In developing countries with weak institutions, there is implicitly a large reliance on elections to instill norms of accountability and reduce corruption. In this paper we show that electoral discipline may be ineffective in reducing corruption when political competition is too high or too low....

We develop a model of parallel contests, asymmetric in quantity of homogeneous prizes open to contest, with a finite number of homogeneous risk-neutral bidders assumed to have a linear effort-cost function. We show that at equilibrium the expected effort per capita in the larger contest is...

In this article, we establish a model of competitive insurance markets based on Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) where insurers can perform risk classification tests either before insurance contracts are issued (underwriting) or when coverage claims are filed (post-loss test). However, insurers...

This analysis introduces a theoretical framework for assessing the empirical discussion of asymmetric information amongst mortgage lenders and adds the idea of lender competition into this framework. Despite this addition, the results are generally consistent with existing empirical findings...

We provide a game-theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a continuum of Bayesian voters. Voters are uncertain about candidate positions, which are exogenously given and lie on a unidimensional policy space. Candidates take unobservable, costly...

In this paper, we study N-player Colonel Blotto games with incomplete information about battlefield valuations. Such games arise in job markets, research and development, electoral competition, security analysis, and conflict resolution. For M ≥ N + 1 battlefields, we identify a Bayes-Nash...

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...

In winner-take-all tournaments, agents' performance is determined jointly by effort and luck, and the top performer is rewarded. We study the impact of the ''shape of luck'' -- the details of the distribution of performance shocks -- on incentives in such settings. We are concerned with the...

I study optimal disclosure policies in sequential contests. A contest designer chooses at which periods to publicly disclose the efforts of previous contestants. I provide results for a wide range of possible objectives for the contest designer. While different objectives involve different...

We study contests in which contestants are homogeneous and have convex effort costs. Increasing contest competitiveness, by making prizes more unequal, scaling up the competition, or adding new contestants, always discourages effort. These results have significant implications: although often...