This paper shows why a majority of legislators may vote for a policy that benefits a firm but harms all legislators. The firm may induce legislators to support the policy by suggesting that it is more likely to invest in a district where voters or their representative support the policy. In...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumer’s problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort...

We analyze how a contest organizer chooses optimally the winner when the contestants’ efforts are already exerted and commitment to the use of a given contest success function is not possible. We define the notion of rationalizability in mixed-strategies to capture such a situation. Our...

Despite the popularity of auction theoretical thinking, it appears that no one has presented an elementary equilibrium analysis of the complete information first-price sealed-bid auction mechanism when the bidding space has a finite grid. This paper aims to remedy that omission. We show that...

Because campaign finance reform is usually motivated by the concern that existing legislation cannot effectively prevent campaign contributions to "buy favors," this article assumes that contributions influence political decisions. But, given that it is also widely recognized that interest...

Scandals of selective reporting of clinical trial results by pharmaceutical firms have underlined the need for more transparency in clinical trials. We provide a theoretical framework which reproduces incentives for selective reporting and yields three key implications concerning regulation....