One of the fundamental problems of the positive theory of income taxation is explaining why the statutory income tax schedules in all industrialized democracies are marginal-rate progressive. While it is commonly believed that this is but a simple consequence of the fact that the number of...

We furnish conditions on the primitives of a Bayesian game that guarantee the existence of a Bayes-Nash equilibrium. We consider spaces of distributional and behavioral strategies, and highlight the relationship between their respective topologies, which implies that the two spaces are mutually...

We prove the existence of a pure-strategy trembling-hand perfect equilibrium in upper semicontinuous potential games, and we show that generic potential games possess pure-strategy strictly perfect and essential equilibria. We also establish a more powerful result: the set of maximizers of an...

It is known that generic games within certain collections of infinite-action normal-form games have only essential equilibria. We point to a difficulty in showing that essential equilibria in generic games are (strictly) perfect, and we identify collections of games whose generic members have...

We identify a class of discontinuous normal-form games whose members possess strategically stable sets, defined according to an infinite-game extension of Kohlberg and Mertens’s (1986) equilibrium concept, and show that, generically, a set is stable if and only if it contains a single Nash...

We provide approximation results for Nash equilibria in possibly discontinuous games when payoffs and strategy sets are perturbed. We then prove existence results for a new “finitistic” infinite-game generalization of Selten’s (Int J Game Theory 4: 25–55, <CitationRef CitationID="CR23">1975</CitationRef>) notion of perfection and...</citationref>

We explore the consequences of electoral competition for nonlinear income taxation. Our model is a dynamic version of the standard two-party electoral competition model adapted to nonlinear income taxation. The theory has a number of desirable features. First, equilibria always exist, even...

The theory of incomplete contracting is rival to that of complete contracting as a frame of reference to understand contractual relationships. Both approaches rest upon diametrically opposed postulates and lead to very different policy conclusions. From a theoretical viewpoint, scrutiny of the...