The difficulty of optimal decision making in uncertain dichotomous choice settings is that it requires information on the expertise of the decision makers (voters). This paper presents a method of optimally weighting voters even without testing them against questions with known right answers....

The main drawback of the public-policy contest is that the notion of contest success function, a crucial component of the contest model, does not have micro-foundations and, therefore, the random behavior of the government seems ad-hoc. In the present paper we propose a partial micro-foundation...

The compromise enhancing effect of lobbying on public policy has been established in two typical settings. In the first, lobbies are assumed to act as 'principals' and the setters of the policy (the candidates in a Downsian electoral competition or the elected policy maker in a citizen-...

A substantial number of regulatory frameworks are commonly viewed by impartial observers as inordinately complex. Is there an explanation for this phenomenon? Employing a partial equilibrium model, this paper approaches the problem of complexity from a political-economy vantage point. It...

This paper studies collective contests with endogenous cost sharing, general effort costs and intra-group heterogeneity of prize-valuation. Our objective is to clarify the relationship between cost sharing, intra-group heterogeneity within the competing groups and the elasticity of the marginal...

We propose the concept of level r consensus as a useful property of a preference profile which considerably enhances the stability of social choice. This concept involves a weakening of unanimity, the most extreme form of consensus. It is shown that if a preference profile exhibits level r...

This paper evaluates direct and structural discrimination as a means of increasing efforts in the most widely studied contests. We establish that a designer who maximizes efforts subject to a balanced-budget constraint prefers dual discrimination, namely, change of the contestants’ prize...

Government intervention often gives rise to contests in which the possible ‘prizes’ are determined by the existing status-quo and some new public- policy proposal . In this paper we study the general class of such two-player public-policy contests and examine the effect of a change in the...

In this paper we study the endogenous determination of monopoly price. Our proposed game of endogenous monopoly-price setting extends the literature on monopoly-price, monopoly rent-seeking contests and monopoly rent-seeking rent-avoidance contests by (i) determining the monopoly price such that...

Economic policy is modeled as the outcome of a (political) game between two inte rest groups. The possible ex-post (realized) outcomes in the game correspond to the proposed policies. In the literature the policies fought for are exogenous. We extend such games by allowing the endogenous...