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...

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.

I present a two-player nested contest which is a convex combination of two widely studied contests: the Tullock (lottery) contest and the all-pay auction. A Nash equilibrium exists for all parameters of the nested contest. If and only if the contest is sufficiently asymmetric, then there is an...

I consider a model in which an autocrat can be removed from power either through a military coup or a revolution by the citizens. In the event of a revolt by the citizens, the military may choose to support the autocrat to crush the revolt or play a passive role. The autocrat determines the...

I study a two-period model of conflict with two combatants and a third party who is an ally of one of the combatants. The third party is fully informed about the type of her ally but not about the type of her ally's enemy. There is a signaling game between the third party and her ally's enemy...

I consider a model in which an asset owner must decide how much to invest in his asset mindful of the fact that an encroacher's valuation of the asset is increasing in the asset owner's investment. Due to incomplete property rights, the encroacher and asset owner engage in a contest over the...

I consider a contest in which the quantity of output is rewarded and another in which the quality of output is rewarded. The output in the quality contest plays a dual role. It counts in the quality contest but it is also converted into quantity-equivalent output to obtain total output in the...

Status-seeking exists in all societies but different societies value status differently. How does the importance of social status affect the mode of status-seeking? I consider a game in which status can be achieved through productive effort that increases wealth or through a contest in which...

There are several empirical studies of ex post analysis of citations in academia. There is no ex ante analysis of citations. I consider a game-theoretic model of a contest between scholars on the basis of two widely-used measures of citations (i.e., the ℎ-index and total citation count) and...