This study investigates whether excess effort to climb a career ladder justifies policy interventions. The answer depends on whether the government is able to levy a higher tax burden on career workers than on non-career workers. Both a tax on top income aimed at lowering the rewards of...

This paper studies the effects of different income transfers on individual welfare, in both marriage and divorce situations, and on family decisions. We assume three generations within the family. We develop a sequential game that, in a first stage, determines the optimum level of the transfer...

Contests, in which contestants compete at their own expenses for prizes offered by a contest holder, have become the foundational primitive of many theories of competition. Recently, the focus in contest research has turned to the role of in-contest performance feedback. The extant literature on...

Considering several main types of dynamic contests (the race, the tug-of-war, elimination contests and iterated incumbency fights) we identify a common pattern: the discouragement effect. This effect explains why the sum of rentseeking efforts often falls considerably short of the prize that is...

We consider a best-of-three Tullock contest between two ex-ante identical players. An effort-maximizing designer commits to a vector of player-specific biases (advantages or disadvantages). In our benchmark model the designer chooses victory-dependent biases (i.e., the biases depend on the...

This paper studies the effects of different income transfers on individual welfare, in both marriage and divorce situations, and on family decisions. We assume three generations within the family. We develop a sequential game that, in a first stage, determines the optimum level of the transfer...

Mit der Implementierung des Bestellerprinzips - wer den Makler beauftragt, muss ihn auch bezahlen - hat der Gesetzgeber einen Wechsel der Zahllast für die Courtage vom Mieter zum Vermieter vorgenommen. Mit Hilfe eines sequentiellen Verhandlungsspiels wird hier diskutiert, inwieweit der Wechsel...