I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has many applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of the commons. I show that information about other players'...

Activist NGOs increasingly oppose industrial projects that have nevertheless been approved by public regulators. To understand this recent rise in NGO activism, we develop a theory of optimal regulation in which a regulated industry seeks to undertake a project that may be harmful to society. On...

The energy transition increases the demand for minerals from ethnically diverse, conflict-prone developing countries. We study whether and where mining is possible in such countries without raising the risk of civil conflict. We proceed in three steps: First, we propose a theoretical model to...

The allocation of a co-owned company to a single owner using the Texas Shoot-Out mechanism with private valuations is investigated. We identify Knightian Uncertainty about the peer's distribution as the reason for its deterrent effect of an immature dissolving. Modeling uncertainty by a compact...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests with two-sided incomplete information. Private information may concern marginal cost, valuations, and ability. Our main result says that, if the contest is uniformly...

Using mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals by companies from the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, this study analyzes the role of different types of prior ties between companies. The research distinguishes related alliances into direct and indirect alliances. Related alliances provide...

Turf wars commonly occur in environments where competition undermines collaboration. We develop a game theoretic model and experimental test of turf wars. The model explores how team production incentives ex post affect team formation decisions ex ante. In the game, one agent decides whether to...

This paper studies a contest in which players with unobservable types may form an alliance in a pre-stage of the game to join their forces and compete for a prize. We characterize the pure strategy equilibria of this game of incomplete information. We show that if the formation of an alliance is...

The authors of the article point out that the theory of economics has failed to yield a solid theoretical background in such critical situations as the transformational period of post-communist economies and the period of the current financial and economic crisis. While classical liberal or...