This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. We characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information. The type of one player is common knowledge. The type of the other player is drawn from a...

Scholars making economic policy recommendations to resolve corruption problem use several approaches, the most dominant of which are the principal-agent and rent-seeking theories. In this paper, we argue that the principal-agent theory has problems accounting for the environment in which the...

The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between strategic alliances and the cost of debt, proxied by the at-issue yield spread of bond offerings. We hypothesize that the participation of strategic alliances lowers a firm’s cost of debt because it improves the level and...

Collective action is a dynamic process where individuals in a group assess over time the benefits and costs of participating toward the success of a collective goal. Early participation improves the expectation of success and thus stimulates the subsequent participation of other individuals who...

Based on M&A deals by companies from the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, I analyze the role of different types of prior ties between companies. I distinguish related alliances into direct and indirect alliances. Related alliances provide access to more information and can reduce...

In this paper, I characterize neutral mechanisms for the provision of a public good. I show that neutral mechanisms form a reasonable set of predictions for mechanism selection in public goods problems; such predictions are sufficiently sharp, robust to a perturbation of the information...

An important set of contract terms manages potential disputes. In a detailed, hand-coded sample of mergers and acquisition (M&A) contracts from 2007 and 2008, dispute management provisions correlate strongly with target ownership, state of incorporation, and industry, and with the experience of...

If civil war is a contest for popular support, why would a government ever embark on a policy of disproportionate force and mass killing? The logic of civilian defection expects such an approach to easily backfire, as civilians respond to massive losses by opposing the side that inflicted them....