Egalitarianism and meritocracy are competing principles to distribute the joint benefits of cooperation. We examine the consequences of letting members of society vote between those two principles, in a context where individuals must joint with others into coalitions of a certain size to become...

We consider the following allocation problem: A fixed number of public facilities must be located on a line. Society is composed of N agents, who must be allocated to one and only one of these facilities. Agents have single peaked preferences over the possible location of the facilities they are...

In this paper we study a two period contest where the strength of players in the second period depends on the result of the contest in the first stage. We show that in contrast to one-shot contests in the same setting, heterogeneous players exert different efforts in the first stage and rent...

We characterize the sharing rule for which a contribution mechanism achieves efficiency in a cooperative production setting when agents are heterogeneous. The sharing rule bears no resemblance to those considered by the previous literature. We also show for a large class of sharing rules that if...

The financing of higher education through public spending imposes a transfer of resources from taxpayers to the university students and their parents. We provide an explanation for this phenomenon. Those who attend higher education will earn more income in the future and will pay more taxes....

This paper proposes an argument that explains incumbency advantage without recurring to the collective irresponsibility of legislatures. For that purpose, we exploit the informational value of incumbency: incumbency confers voters information about governing politicians not available from...

We present a model of cooperative production in which rational agents might carry out sabotage activities that decrease output. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a Nash equilibrium without sabotage. It is shown that the absence of sabotage in equilibrium depends...

In this paper we consider a model of cooperative production in which rational agents have the possibility to engage in sabotage activities that decrease output. It is shown that sabotage depends on the interplay between the degree of congestion, the technology of sabotage, the number of agents...

This paper exploits the informational value of incumbency: incumbency confers voters information about governing politicians not available from challengers. We propose a measure of incumbency advantage that improves the use of pure reelection success. We also study the relationship between...

We characterize the sharing rule for which a contribution mechanism achieves efficiency in a cooperative production setting when agents are heterogeneous. This rule differs from the one obtained by Sen for the case of identical agents. We also show for a large class of sharing rules that if Nash...