How can office-seeking politicians or managers be aligned with social welfare or firm welfare, given that such agents have a suboptimal incentive to cater to majority preferences in situations with low participation costs and to elite preferences in situations with high participation costs? In...

The paper presents experimental evidence on the impact of managers and their incentives on the behavior of group members in intergroup contests. I find that members follow the nonbinding investment recommendations of their group manager in particular if the managers payoff does not depend on the...

CEO activism refers to corporate leaders taking a public stand on issues such as race relations, gender equality or climate change not directly related to their business. In this paper, we investigate under what conditions CEO activism can create firm value. We develop a model where consumers...

Consider an uninformed decision maker (DM) who communicates with a partially informed speaker (S) through cheap talk. DM can choose a project to implement or the outside option of no project. We show that if the agents' ex-ante rankings over projects do not coincide, then this conflict of...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of severe misconducts in contests based on data from European football championships. We differentiate between two types of severe misconducts both resulting in a yellow card, namely dissents with the referee and other misconducts, and between...

In recent years, a large academic debate has tried to explain the rapid rise in CEO pay experienced over the past three decades. In this article, I review the main proposed theories, which span views of compensation as the result of a competitive labor market for executives to theories based on...

We examine whether economic and military competence of political leaders affect their duration in office. We introduce leader heterogeneity in the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) and derive the hypothesis that in the presence of a revolutionary threat, economic competence...

We analyse the hitherto unexplored relationship between intra-firm conflict between the research and development (R&D) department and central management, conflict alleviation and the choice of ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ innovation, in the context of a simple formal model. We find that in the...

Adequate wages are an important tool to shield public officials from special interests and corruption. But what is the equilibrium effect of higher wages in the presence of criminal pressure groups, who use both bribes and violence? By means of a regression discontinuity design, we show that an...