The seminal paper by Salant, Switzer and Reynolds (1983) showed that merger in a standard Cournot framework with linear demand and linear costs is not profitable unless a large majority of the firms are involved in the merger. However, many strategic aspects matter for firm competition such as...

We characterize the equilibrium of the all-pay auction with general convex cost of effort and sequential effort choices. We consider a set of n players who are arbitrarily partitioned into a group of players who choose their efforts "early"; and a group of players who choose "late". Only the...

Altruists and envious people who meet in contests are symbionts. They do better than a population of narrowly rational individuals. If there are only altruists and envious individuals, a particular mixture of altruists and envious individuals is evolutionarily stable.

In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of...

We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each...

Capital tax competition is known to result in inefficiently low tax rates and an undersupply of public goods. The provision of public goods and with it the welfare of all countries can be enhanced via tax coordination. Based on the standard Zodrow-Mieszkowski-Wilson tax-competition model this...

In the basic model of international environmental agreements (IEAs) (Barrett 1994, Rubio and Ulph 2006) extended by international trade, self-enforcing - or stable - IEAs may comprise up to 60% of all countries (Eichner and Pethig 2013). But these IEAs reduce total emissions only slightly...

In the basic model of the literature on international environmental agreements (IEAs) (Barrett 1994; Rubio and Ulph 2006) the number of signatories of self-enforcing IEAs does not exceed three, if non-positive emissions are ruled out. We extend that model by introducing a composite consumer good and...

This paper studies within a multi-country model with international trade the stability of international environmental agreements (IEAs) when countries regulate carbon emissions either by taxes or caps. Regardless of whether coalitions play Nash or are Stackelberg leaders the principal message is...

Itaya et al. (2014) study the conditions for sustainability and stability of capital tax coordination in a repeated game model with tax-revenue maximizing governments. One of their major results is that the grand tax coalition is never stable and sustainable. The purpose of this note is to prove...