We consider a rent-seeking contest in which players can form strategic groups before expending their outlays. We examine the profitability of endogenous group formation and the effect of such group formation on rent dissipation. We show the following: When just one strategic group is formed in...

"We study a model of civil dispute with delegation in which a plaintiff's lawyer works on a contingent-fee basis but a defendant's lawyer on an hourly fee basis. We first derive the condition under which delegation to the lawyers brings both litigants more payoffs compared with the case of no...

I examine players' equilibrium effort levels in two-player asymmetric contests with ratio-form contest success functions. I first characterize the Nash equilibrium of the simultaneous-move game. I show that the equilibrium effort ratio is equal to the valuation ratio, and that the prize...

Do consumers' consumer-surplus (CS)-defending activities increase the social costs of monopoly compared to when consumers are inactive? Given just one rent-seeking firm, consumers' CS-defending activities generally increase the social costs of monopoly, but given two or more rent-seeking firms,...

We model biological invasions as an unintended by-product of capital accumulation. We distinguish three spillover effects: (1) a negative production externality, (2) a negative or positive consumption externality and (3) an increase in the risk of future welfare loss. We also consider the...

"Researchers have found that voting can help increase voluntary contributions to a public good-provided enforcement through a third party. Not all collective agreements, however, guarantee third-party enforcement. We design an experiment to explore whether a voting rule with and without...

"Food products containing genetically modified (GM) ingredients have entered the market over the past decade. The biotech industry and environmental groups have disseminated conflicting private information about GM foods. This paper develops a unique methodology for valuing independent...