Economists have long argued over the political economy of tradable emission permits, especially the political pressure of lobby groups on international environmental agreements. However, little attention has been paid to the effects of cross-national lobbying on this market. Here, we examine how...

The selection of political representatives depends on the political system. Principals, such as voters or districts, may benefit by strategically electing representatives different from themselves. While a status-quo biased delegate may be a better negotiator, an enthusiastic representative has...

I investigate if, how, and why the effect of a contribution rule in a public goods game depends on how it is implemented: endogenously chosen or externally imposed. The rule prescribes full contributions to the public good backed by a nondeterrent sanction for those who do not comply. My...

This paper reports the results of a public good experiment with voting. The standard game in which subjects decide simultaneously on their contributions to a public good is extended by a second stage. In this stage, subjects can express agreement or disagreement with the contributions of their...

This paper studies experimentally how the endogeneity of sanctioning institutions affects the severity of punishment in social dilemmas. We allow individuals to vote on the introduction of third-party-administered sanctions, and compare situations in which the adoption of this institution is...

We study a design problem for an effort-maximizing principal in a two-player contest with two dimensions of asymmetry. Players have different skill levels and an information gap exists, as only one player knows the skill difference. The principal has two policy instruments to redress the lack of...

Zhang and Zhou (2016) use the concept of Bayesian persuasion due to Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011) to analyze information disclosure in a contest with one-sided asymmetric information. They show that an effort-maximizing designer can manipulate information disclosure to increase expected efforts...

This paper examines whether an institution has a differing impa ct on cooperation if it is introduced by a representative of the affected partie s rather than exogenously imposed. The experimental design is able to control for selec tion effects arising from the democratic policy choice. I find...

This paper considers an economy with a public good where a decision must be made both about the level of the public good and the taxation imposed on each citizen (multidimensional policy space). In this context, we derive two interesting results: i) we show that a Nash equilibrium exists under...

This paper studies experimentally how the endogeneity of sanctioning institutions affects the severity of punishment in social dilemmas. We allow individuals to vote on the introduction of third-party-administered sanctions, and compare situations in which the adoption of this institution is...