In this note, we characterize the equilibria of the standard pivotal-voter participation game between two groups of voters of asymmetric sizes, as originally proposed by Palfrey and Rosenthal [1983. A strategic calculus of voting. Public Choice. 41, 7-53]

One of the most widely accepted explanations for why wars occur despite its Pareto-suboptimality is mutual optimism: if both sides expect to gain a lot by fighting, war becomes inevitable. The literature on mutual optimism typically assumes mutually optimistic beliefs and shows that, under such...

Given the prevalence of local public goods, whose broader use is often limited by distance and borders, we propose a potential solution to the free-riding problem by having each participant/beneficiary delegate the public good contribution decision to a non-local intermediary who neither puts in...

We consider a best-of-three Tullock contest between two ex-ante identical players. An effort-maximizing designer commits to a vector of player-specific biases (advantages or disadvantages). In our benchmark model the designer chooses victory-dependent biases (i.e., the biases depend on the...