If the defendant in a lawsuit is better informed than the plaintiff about the value of damages that could potentially be assigned by the court, biasing the burden of proof toward the plaintiff may lower aggregate efficiency losses from litigation. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

Conventions are social institutions that solve recurrent coordination problems. In normative game theory, coordination games are considered problematic because of the multiplicity of equilibria. From a neoinstitutionalist perspective, however, this multiplicity should be an important part of the...

We consider imperfectly discriminating, common-value, all-pay auctions (or contests) in which some players know the value of the prize, others do not. We show that if the prize is always of positive value, then all players are active in equilibrium. If the prize is of value zero with positive...

In a first-price all-pay auction buyers have an incentive to delegate the bidding to agents and to provide these agents with incentives to make bids that differ from the bids the buyers would like to make. Both buyers are better off in this strictly non-cooperative delegation equilibrium and the...