In this note, we characterize the equilibria of the standard pivotal-voter participation game between two groups of voters of asymmetric sizes, as originally proposed by Palfrey and Rosenthal [1983. A strategic calculus of voting. Public Choice. 41, 7-53]

We consider a best-of-three Tullock contest between two ex-ante identical players. An effort-maximizing designer commits to a vector of player-specific biases (advantages or disadvantages). In our benchmark model the designer chooses victory-dependent biases (i.e., the biases depend on the...

In alternating-offer bargaining, a seller is "stubborn" if she demands the same asking price more than once. We provide empirical evidence on stubbornness and inform the theoretical literature by analyzing millions of eBay bargaining threads taken from Backus et al. (2020). Focusing on the best...

Multi-battle team contests are ubiquitous in real-life competitions. All temporal structures of multi-battle team contests yield the same total effort, as demonstrated by Fu, Lu, and Pan (2015, American Economic Review, 105(7): 2120-40)'s remarkable temporal-structure independence. Rather than...

We propose a belief-based theory for private information games. A Bk player forms correct beliefs up to the k^th-order, and heuristic beliefs from the (k +1)^th-order onwards. Correct beliefs follow the prior distribution of types, as in standard game theory. Heuristic beliefs ignore the...

We propose a simple model to investigate whether an agent works harder when she is informed of the tasks' deadlines (i.e., under transparent management) or not (i.e., under opaque management). We do so in a stylized model where; 1) in each period, the agent may work at some cost, rather than...

We examine the effect of publicly disclosing or concealing bidders' types in an all-pay auction with a common bid cap. We call partial (full) disclosure policy the setup where the contest designer's disclosure policy is (not) contingent on type realization. Despite a bid cap possibly increasing...

In sequential contests between ex-ante symmetric players, the outcome of early battles creates an asymmetry in players' incentives to expend resources, which undermines future expenditures. This dynamic force is absent in simultaneous contests, and consequently expenditures in sequential...

We aim at characterizing which kind of functions could be explained (rationalized) as the best reply of payoff-maximizing agents in contests for a fixed prize. We show that the rationalizability strongly differs between Decisive Contests, where the prize is allocated with certainty, and Possibly...

A contestant's effort depends on her knowledge of her rival's type. This knowledge is often limited in real-life contests. I propose a model where the principal of a contest has commitment power to verifiably disclose contestants' types. What is the optimal disclosure policy to stimulate...