According to the so-called Exclusion Principle (introduced by Baye et alii, 1993), it might be profitable for the seller to reduce the number of fully-informed potential bidders in an all-pay auction. We show that it does not apply if the seller regards the bidders’ private valuations as...

We develop a model of lobbying in which a time and resource constrained policymaker first chooses which policy proposals to learn about, before choosing which to implement. The policymaker reviews the proposals of the interest groups who provide the highest contributions. We study how policy...

In competition for access, interest groups provide contributions to a politician and those that provide the highest contributions win access. Groups with access present information that may influence the politician's beliefs about the socially optimal policy. Because equilibrium contributions...

There is substantial evidence that political contributions buy access to politicians. This paper incorporates access into a model of informational lobbying, then uses the access framework to analyze the impact of contribution limits on policy outcomes and representative citizen welfare. In the...

We show that the seller’s optimal reserve price in an all-pay auction with complete information is higher than in a standard auction. We use our results to re-consider some findings of the literature that models lobbying games as all-pay auctions. In particular, we show that the so-called...

Despite the wide occurrence of ties in a variety of contest settings, the strategic interaction that arises when ties are treated as viable outcomes has received little attention. Building on recent theoretical work, we experimentally examine an extension of the canonical two-player all-pay...

We consider a takeover in which risk neutral bidders must incur participation costs and study their optimal strategy. We found that bidders decision of participation is endogenous. There is a threshold of private participation cost above that a potential bidder will stay out of takeover process....