We show that credit rating agencies can influence political elections. We find that incumbent political parties experience an increase in their vote shares following municipal bond upgrades. The evidence is consistent with rating agencies affecting elections indirectly through an expansion of...

The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which specifies the winning probabilities of agents. We provide an axiomatization of two parametric families of CSF's. In the first, the winning probability of each agent depends on the investments and a vector of...

We study equilibrium in a multistage race in which players compete in a sequence of simultaneous move component contests. Players may win a prize for winning each component contest, as well as a prize for winning the overall race. Each component contest is an all-pay auction with complete...

This paper considers a situation in which participants with heterogeneous ability types are grouped into different competitions for performance ranking. In a contest, there may be performance spillovers, because of which a participant can benefit from others' performance. A planner can allocate...

In a multi-project contract environment with a single agent who is subject to limited liability, the optimality of performance bundling across all projects is well established: The agent should be rewarded only if all projects are successful. In this paper, we study performance bundling across...