In psychological games, higher-order beliefs, emotions, and motives - in addition to actions - affect players' payoffs. Suppose you are invited to a party, movie, dinner, etc not because your company is desired but because the inviter would feel guilty if she did not invite you. In all of these...

This paper studies sabotage in a contest with non-identical players. Unlike previous papers, we consider sabotage in an elimination contest and allow contestants to sabotage a potential or future rival. It turns out that for a certain partition of players there is a pure-strategy equilibrium in...

This paper reviews the relatively small literature on sabotage in contests. It looks at both the formal game-theoretic literature and the empirical and experimental literatures. The treatment is intended to be intuitive with minimal use of technical jargon.

In the very popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, the judges, who are presumably experts in evaluating singing effort, have no voting power when the field is narrowed to the top twenty-four contestants. It is only the votes of viewers that count. In the 2007 season of the show, Simon...

In the popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, the judges, who are presumably experts in evaluating singing effort, have no voting power when the field is narrowed to the top twenty-four contestants. It is only the votes of viewers that count. In the 2007 season of the show, one of the...

History is replete with overt discrimination of various forms. However, these forms of discrimination are not equally tolerable. For example, discrimination based on immutable or prohibitively unalterable characteristics such as race or gender is much less acceptable. Why? I develop a simple...

Suppose you are invited to a party, movie, dinner, etc not because your company is desired but because the inviter would feel guilty if she did not invite you. Furthermore, suppose the inviter extends an insincere invitation hoping that you will reject it and thereby assuage his guilt. I...

A primary means of bureaucratic oversight is consumer complaints. Yet, this important control mechanism has received very little attention in the literature on corruption. I study a model of corruption with incomplete information in which consumers require a government service from officials who...