There is widespread agreement on the value of competition in the delivery of public goods and services. In some markets competition is naturally limited and thus various mechanisms have been utilized to bolster competition, including franchise bidding and auctions. In this article, we examine...

The frequent renegotiation of public contracts is variously attributed to collusion between officials and bidders, the desire to circumvent budgetary rules, and other factors. This column challenges the industrial organisation view of public contract renegotiation, showing that frequent...

Administrative enforcement of China's Anti-Monopoly Law is shared among three ministries, and a pan-ministry commission sits above these ministries to coordinate competition policy. This two-tiered tripartite enforcement structure has been criticized as inefficient, costly, and ineffective. In...

“Improvements” in the mechanisms of democracy for making decisions about providing taxpayer-financed public goods can lead the economy in the same direction as authoritarianism. Such a by-product may be insignificant, but, even if so, a tradition of abridging democracy, similarly to an...

Informal monitors can sometimes substitute for formal law enforcement. Monitors hired to minimize cheating, however, are themselves vulnerable to collusion and extortion. I focus on one such informal monitor – the fair authorities at the trade fairs at Champagne – asking why the fairs...

I construct an efficient game of competition for insurance markets with adverse selection. In the game, each company offers two menus of contracts: a public menu and a private menu. The union of all the public menus needs to be offered by every active company in the market. A private menu...

Multiple candidates (senders) compete over an exogenous number of jobs. There are different tasks in which the candidates' unobservable ability determines their probability of success. We study a signaling game with multiple senders each choosing one task to perform, and one receiver who...

We consider the design of contests for n agents when the principal can choose both the prize profile and the contest success function. Our framework includes Tullock contests, Lazear-Rosen tournaments and all-pay contests as special cases, among others. We show that the optimal contest has an...

We study a design problem for an effort-maximizing principal in a two-player contest with two dimensions of asymmetry. Players have different skill levels and an information gap exists, as only one player knows the skill difference. The principal has two policy instruments to redress the lack of...

We model a two-candidate electoral competition in which there is uncertainty about a policy-relevant state of the world. The candidates receive private signals about the true state, which are imperfectly correlated. We study whether the candidates are able to credibly communicate their...