This paper provides a general theory explaining the geographic and population size and wealth of nations. Successful countries create conditions for high productivity in the economic sphere by enforcing property rights and providing social overhead capital and at the same time minimize political...

We provide a characterization of participants' behavior in a contest or tournament where the marginal productivity of effort varies across contestants and individual productivity is private information. We then consider the optimal design of such a contest. We first analyze contestant behavior...

This paper examines the implementability of social choice functions when only partial verification of private information is possible. Green and Laffont (1986) used this framework to derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the revelation principle to continue to hold with partial...

Voters value candidate characteristics such as honesty and competence. These are known as valence issues. In this paper, we consider the situation where candidates may have more than one valence characteristic of importance to the voters. At the same time we introduce a new concept "the...

We show that status-quo bias combined with downward-sloping demand implies addictive behavior. This result does not depend on transitivity, a complete ordering, or even the existence of a preference relation that rationalizes choices

This paper shows how uninformed but rational voters can respond intelligently to political advertising. The paper models a situation where a candidate must rely on a pressure group for financing political advertising. The pressure group uses its power over the purse to influence the position...

The optimal organization of the family requires that relations are structured so that non-cooperative game playing is minimized and transaction costs are reduced. I show that therapeutic advice for behavior within the family is to create a functioning property rights system. Punishment is shown...

Candidates may vary in quality, where quality is some characteristic orthogonal to policy. This "simple modification" has for the most part defied integration into the Downsian framework. Here we add the following complicating factors. We consider the possibility that there are uninformed voters...