This note reconsiders communication between an informed expert and an uninformed decision maker with a strategic mediator in a discrete Crawford and Sobel (1982) setting. We show that a strategic mediator may improve communication even when he is biased into the same direction as the expert. The...

Lobbyists choose what to lobby for. If they can precommit to certain policy proposals, their choice will have an influence on the behavior of opposing lobbyists. Hence lobbyists have an incentive to moderate their policy proposals in order to reduce the intensity of the lobbying contest. This...

This paper models the trade-off between production and appropriation in the presence of simultaneous inter- and intra-group conflicts. The model exhibits a 'group cohesion effect': if the contest between the groups becomes more decisive, or contractual incompleteness between groups becomes more...

This paper studies rent-seeking contests where the contestants do not know the number of actively competing contestants. Two models are compared. In the first, all players are risk neutral; in the second, all have constant absolute risk aversion. If the expected fraction of active contestants is...

Lobbyists choose what to lobby for. If they can precommit to certain policy proposals, their choice will have an influence on the behavior of opposing lobbyists. Hence lobbyists have an incentive to moderate their policy proposals in order to reduce the intensity of the lobbying contest. This...

In an interesting recent paper, Dari-Mattiacci and Parisi (2005) extended Tullock's (1980) rent-seeking game with an entry decision. The mixed strategies identified by Dari-Mattiacci and Parisi for the case of increasing returns in the contest success function (r2) do not constitute an...

This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. First, we characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information where one player has private information about his valuation. Then, we use ou rresults...

We study the incentives to share private information ahead of contests, such as markets with promotional competition, procurement contests, or R&D. We consider the cases where firms have (i) independent values and (ii) common values of winning the contest. In both cases, when decisions to share...

This paper studies sabotage in a dynamic tournament. Three players compete in two rounds. In the final round, a player who is leading in the race, but not yet beyond the reach of his competitors, is sabotaged more heavily. As a consequence, if all players start off at the same position, they do...