We investigate whether and how targeted rebates impede rational switching of consumers from an incumbent to an outside option (e.g., market entrant). In a real trading problem, participants repeatedly buy tokens and can enter a target rebate scheme. Buying in a rebate scheme considerably reduces...

In many countries, betting in sports is highly regulated. In Germany, however, there are current debates whether regulation should be loosened. A crucial part of the argument is that sport bets could be qualified as games of skill that are considered to be less dangerous by German Law than games...

Information exchange in policy networks is usually attributed to preference similarity, influence reputation, social trust and institutional actor roles. We suggest that political opportunity structures and transaction costs play another crucial role and estimate a rich statistical network model...

The study of policy discourse comprises actor-centered and content-oriented approaches. We attempt to close the gap between the two kinds of approaches by introducing a new methodology for the analysis of political discourse called Discourse Network Analysis. It is based on social network...

Since the Treaty of Lisbon, national parliamentary chambers in the European Union can issue reasoned opinions on legislative proposals by the European Commission. These individual reasoned opinions lead to a review if at least one third of all chambers raise such concerns. Hence, coordination...

The paper deals with the complexity of legal norms and the instrument the German constitutional law establishes to control it, namely the requirement of normative clarity. First, I introduce a definition of complexity of written legal norms, conceptualized by their density (number of items to be...

We consider non-cooperative environments in which two players have the power to commit but cannot sign binding agreements. We show that by committing to a set of actions rather than to a single action, players can implement a wide range of action profiles. We give a complete characterization of...

A game-theoretic framework that allows for explicitly randomized strategies is used to study the e ect of ambiguity aversion on equilibrium outcomes. The notions of 'independent strategies' as well as of 'common priors' are amended to render them applicable to games in which players lack...

The nonexistence of equilibria in models of electoral competition involving multiple issues is one of the more puzzling results in political economics. In this paper, we relax the standard assumption that parties act as expected utility maximizers. We show that equilibria often exist when...

The paper introduces the assumption of costly information acquisition to the theory of mechanism design for matching allocation problems. It is shown that the assumption of endogenous information acquisition greatly changes some of the cherished results in that theory: in particular, the...