This paper endogenizes the strategic relationship between a principal (a player with authority) and an agent (a player without authority), and shows that a submissive relationship is the unique equilibrium outcome. That is, the agent voluntarily chooses a task that will increase the principal's...

Competition between heterogeneous participants often leads to low effort provision in contests. We consider a principal who can divide her fixed budget between skill-enhancing training and the contest prize. Training can reduce heterogeneity, which increases effort. However, allocating some of...

Shareholder proposals are a common form of shareholder activism. Voting for shareholder proposals, however, is nonbinding since management has the authority to reject the proposal even if it received majority support from shareholders. We analyze whether nonbinding voting is an effective...

A motivation for the paper is to reveal the "calculative silences" of scholars who limit their research and teaching to organisations that are centralised command and control hierarchies favoured by dictators. Centralisation introduces systemic unethical and dysfunctional relationships from the...

We study global games of regime change within networks of truthful communication. Agents can choose between attacking and not attacking a status quo, whose strength is unknown. Players share private signals on this state of the world with their immediate neighbors. Communication with neighboring...

We analyze the consequences of activism in a regulated industry where the regulator has been captured by the industry. Unlike ordinary economic agents, activists are insensitive to monetary incentives. Moreover, they are less well informed than regulators and their actions generate dead-weight...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Provided that the contest is uniformly asymmetric, full revelation is the unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome. This is so because the weakest type of the...

We consider a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests with privately informed players. We show that findings by Athey (2001) imply the existence of a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in monotone pure strategies.

Over 20 years, M&A contracts have more than doubled in size – from 35 to 88 single-spaced pages in this paper's font. They have also grown significantly in linguistic complexity – from post-graduate “grade 20” to post-doctoral “grade 30”. A substantial portion (lower bound ~20%) of...