This paper studies a principal-agent relation in which the principal's private information about the agent's effort choice is more accurate than a noisy public performance measure. For some contingencies the optimal contract has to specify ex post inefficiencies in the form of inefficient...

This paper studies the institutional design of newspaper and periodical wholesale. Motivated by recent developments in Germany, we compare the efficiency properties of two alternative regimes for determining the wholesale margins: collective bargaining (as practised in Germany for the last...

Players often engage in high-profile public communications to demonstrate their confidence in winning before they carry out actual competitive activities. We investigate players’ incentives to engage in such pre-contest communication. Our key assumption is that a player suffers a cost when he...

We consider a dynamic tournament where contestants choose a productive effort and to help or sabotage their opponents. Sabotage lowers the output of the victim. Moreover, sabotage imposes an additional direct psychic cost on the victim. Because the current leader is sabotaged most strongly in...

We model strategic mediation of the communication between an informed expert with a discrete type space and an uninformed decision maker. A strategic mediator can improve communication even when he is biased into the same direction as the expert.

This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. First, we characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information where one player has private information about his valuation. Then, we use our results...

This article presents a new theoretical perspective on the diversionary use of force. Players are partitioned into groups and choose how to allocate their resources to production, fighting against other groups, and fighting internally. The model gives a rationalist explanation of the group...

The same contestants often meet repeatedly in contests. Behavior in a contest potentially provides information with regard to one's type and can therefore influence the behavior of the opponents in later contests. This paper shows that if effort is observable, this can induce a ratchet effect in...