We examine the consequences of lobbying and vote buying, assuming this practice were allowed and free of stigma. Two .lobbyists. compete for the votes of legislators by oþering up-front payments to the legislators in exchange for their votes. We analyze how the lobbyists.budget constraints and...

We examine the consequences of vote buying, assuming this practice were al-lowed and free of stigma. Two parties compete in a binary election and may purchase votes in a sequential bidding game via up-front binding payments and/or campaign promises (platforms) that are contingent upon the...

This paper analyzes a common-value, first-price auction with state-dependent participation. The number of bidders, which is unobservable to them, depends on the true value. For participation patterns with many bidders in each state, the bidding equilibrium may be of a "pooling" type---with high...

For a steady state to be a Nash equilibrium the agents have to perfectly observe the actions of others. This paper suggests a solution concept for cases where players observe only an imperfect signal of what the others' actions are. The model is enriched by specifying the signal that each player...

Many important services share the feature that the seller is also the expert who determines who much of the service is needed. Even when the outcomes of such service are observable, it might be difficult for the customer to determine what the expert actually did and whether it was needed. This...

Let Gamma be a game in extensive form and G be its reduced normal form game. Let Gamma ^infinity (delta) and G^infinity (delta) be the infinitely repeated game version of Gamma and G respectively, with common discount factor delta. This note points out that the set of SPE payoff vectors of...

This paper studies the problem of a monopoly who is uncertain about the demand it faces and learns about it over time through its pricing experience. The demand curve facing the monopoly is not constant--it changes over time in how it differs from an informed monopoly's policy. It turns out...

The basic intuition that motivates this paper is that the presence of non-maximizing agents creates incentives for maximizing agents to take advantage of them, and when "frictions" are sufficiently small, these incentives might translate seemingly small deviations from maximizing behavior into...