In a society composed of a ruler and its citizens: what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? This paper approaches this problem as a game played between a ruler who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income and a group of agents/citizens who have the...

In this paper, we investigate the optimal taxation policy in a differential oligopoly game where the competing firms share the access to a productive renewable resource. We show that, in a linear Feedback Nash Equilibrium of the game, a linear Markov tax, imposed on the output, and specified as...

Compared with the traditional public-finance approach of a monolithic fully informed planner, earmarking of taxation is less likely to be optimal if a principal-agent setting is considered, where taxing and spending are performed by two separate agents which are monitored by the parliament. We...

Forty-two percent of Americans give different answers when asked, respectively, about the reasons for being rich and the reasons for being poor. We develop and test a theo-ry about support for redistribution in the presence of target-specific beliefs about the causes of low and high incomes. Our...

We define the class of two-player zero-sum games with payoffs having mild discontinuities, which in applications typically stem from how ties are resolved. For games in this class we establish sufficient conditions for existence of a value of the game and minimax or Nash equilibrium strategies...

The paper investigates strategic campaigning in a model of redistributive politics in a society with many groups and two parties. Campaigns are informative, and parties can target campaigns to different groups. Voters are uncertain about whether parties fabor special groups. The parties will...

This paper proposes the Stochastic-Share Contest, a novel contest format that combines the Winner-Take-All Contest and the Proportional-Prize Contest, with the former nesting the latter two as special cases. Motivated by the experimental contest literature, we include risk aversion and a "joy of...

Lobbying is studied in a series of signaling game experiments. Students as well as professional lobbyists are used as subjects. In contrast with some earlier studies, comparing students and professionals, we find significant differences in the behavior of the two subject pools. Professional...

Multi-battle team contests are ubiquitous in real-life competitions. All temporal structures of multi-battle team contests yield the same total effort, as demonstrated by Fu, Lu, and Pan (2015, American Economic Review, 105(7): 2120-40)'s remarkable temporal-structure independence. Rather than...