That individuals contribute in social dilemma interactions even when contributing is costly is a well-established observation in the experimental literature. Since a contributor is always strictly worse off than a non-contributor the question is raised if an intrinsic motivation to contribute...

If contracting within the firm is incomplete, managers will expend resources on trying to appropriate a share of the surplus that is generated. We show that outside ownership may alleviate the deadweight losses associated with such costly distributional conflict, even if all it does is add...

We consider rules (strategies, commitments, contracts, or computer programs) that make behavior contingent on an opponent’s rule. The set of perfectly observable rules is not well defined. Previous contributions avoid this problem by restricting the rules deemed admissible. We instead limit...

The quest for benefit from existing wealth or by seeking privileged benefit through influence over policy is known as rent seeking. Much rent seeking activity involves government and political decisions and is therefore in the domain of political economy, although it can also take place in...

A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

If the defendant in a lawsuit is better informed than the plaintiff about the value of damages that could potentially be assigned by the court, biasing the burden of proof toward the plaintiff may lower aggregate efficiency losses from litigation. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

Conventions are social institutions that solve recurrent coordination problems. In normative game theory, coordination games are considered problematic because of the multiplicity of equilibria. From a neoinstitutionalist perspective, however, this multiplicity should be an important part of the...

We consider rules (strategies, commitments, contracts, or computer programs) that make behavior contingent on an opponent’s rule. The set of perfectly observable rules is not well defined. Previous contributions avoid this problem by restricting the rules deemed admissible. We instead limit...