An all-pay auction in which the winner is determined according to the sum of the bid and the handicap, the latter of which is endowed to the players, is analyzed. The bidding strategy in an equilibrium is explicitly derived as a "piecewise affine transformation" of the equilibrium strategy in...

The auctioning rule in Japanese flower markets is a slightly modified version of that of the original Dutch flower auction. At Japanese flower markets, there is an additional stage, called "mari", where buyers who lost in the previous auction can apply for purchasing the remainder of flowers at...

Taxpayers are considerably interested in tax planning for intergenerational transfers (inter vivos gifts and bequests) that minimize the payment of taxes. Nordblom and Ohlsson (2006) demonstrated that (1) altruistic parents avoid tax payment by changing the timing of transfers when inter vivos...

We analyze a dynamic principal-agent problem in which the agent's effort in each period has strong persistent effects. We show that a simple contract, where the reward depends only on the final outcome, is explained as the optimal contract derived in the principal's optimization problem. The...

We investigate an election model with costly accuracy improvement by allowing heterogeneity in the cost functions. We find that the aggregate accuracy in large elections is characterized by the average value of the inverse of the second derivative at zero information.

We investigate a model where two firms choose whether to acquire information on a common competitor. We find that strategic complementarity on information acquisition exists, yielding multiple equilibria. In addition, we investigate welfare implication of information acquisition. We find that...

In the U.S., the objective of consumer price index (CPI) measurement is to measure the cost of living. However, the current CPI or, in other words, cost of living index (COLI) measures the cost of living in a static optimization problem. This paper proposes a new method to construct a dynamic...

We analyze a symmetric model of an election in which voters are uncertain about which of two alternatives is desirable for them. Each voter must incur some cost to acquire information about the alternatives. We show that by focusing on unbiased voting strategies, general symmetric signal...

We analyze an election with costly information acquisition. We compare the outcome of a large election and that of a delegation. We show that the superiority between the two mechanisms is determined by the shape of the marginal cost function.