We study the relation between the electorate's information about candidates' policy platforms during an election, and the subsequent provision of inefficient local public goods by the elected government. More information does not always lead to better outcomes. We show that the equilibrium...

We model competing groups when players' values for winning are private information, each group's performance equals the best effort ("best shot") of its members, and the group with the best performance wins the contest. At the symmetric equilibrium of symmetric contests, increasing the number of...

This paper studies "voluntary bargaining agreements" in an environment where preferences over an excludable public good are private information. Unlike the case with a non-excludable public good, there are non-trivial conditions when there is significant provision in a large economy. The...

We study the performance of the Quadratic Voting (QV) mechanism proposed by Lalley and Weyl (2016) in finite populations of various sizes using three decreasingly analytic but increasingly precise methods with emphasis on examples calibrated to the 2008 gay marriage referendum in California....

Suggested contributions, membership categories, and discrete, incremental thank-you gifts are devices often used by benevolent associations that provide public goods. Such devices focus donations at discrete levels, thereby effectively limiting the donors' freedom to give. We study the effects...

We examine the private provision of a public good whose level is determined by the least contribution of individual group members. Nash equilibrium can be efficient when the game is one of full information. This paper introduces private information about the costs of effort and characterizes...

Since their introduction in 1932, Likert and other continuous, independent rating scales have become the de facto toolset for survey research. Scholars have raised significant reliability and validity problems with these types of scales, and alternative methods for capturing perceptions and...

"Strategy-proofness" is one of the axioms that are most frequently used in the recent literature on social choice theory. It requires that by misrepresenting his preferences, no agent can manipulate the outcome of the social choice rule in his favor. The stronger requirement of "group...

We study group competition with a single public good prize, perfectly discriminating contest success function, and the weakest-link effort technology, in which the marginal cost of effort for each player is private information. We focus on pure strategy Bayes-Nash equilibria and show that...

A mechanism taxes and finances a public good under the assumption that each agent has a classical concave utility function. In the large limit of the economy with respect to the population, this mechanism asymptotically satisfies dominant strategy implementability and budget balancedness, and...