We study the value of commitment in contests and tournaments when there are costs for the follower to observe the leader's behavior. In a contest, the follower can pay to observe the leader's effort but cannot observe the effectiveness of that effort. In a tournament, the follower can pay to...

Timing is crucial in situations ranging from currency attacks, to product introductions, to starting a revolution. These settings share the feature that payoffs depend critically on the timing of a few other key players - and their moves are uncertain. To capture this, we introduce the notion of...

Friedman (1970) suggests that firms ought not divert profits towards public goods since shareholders can better make these contributions themselves. Despite this, activist shareholders are increasingly successful in persuading firms to be "socially responsible." We study firm behavior when...

We study a Condorcet jury model where voters are driven both by passion (expressive motives) and by reason (instrumental motives). We show that arbitrarily small amounts of passion significantly affect equilibrium behavior and the optimal size of voting bodies. Increasing the size of voting...

We offer a model of “negative vote buying” – paying voters to abstain. While negative vote buying is feasible under the open ballot, it is never optimal. In contrast, a combination of positive and negative vote buying is optimal under the secret ballot: Lukewarm supporters are paid to show...

Why do individuals participate in charitable gambling activities? We conduct a laboratory investigation of a model that predicts risk-neutral expected utility maximizers will participate in lotteries when they recognize that lotteries are being used to finance public goods. As predicted by the...