We suggest a family bargaining model where human capital investment decisions are made non-cooperatively in a first stage, while day-to-day allocation of time is determined later through Nash bargaining, but with non-cooperative behaviour as the fall-back. One finding is that overinvestment in...

We characterize the equilibrium of the all-pay auction with general convex cost of effort and sequential effort choices. We consider a set of n players who are arbitrarily partitioned into a group of players who choose their efforts ’early’ and a group of players who choose ’late’. Only...

In the equilibrium of the all-pay auction with two groups of individual players who move sequentially, only the player with the lowest effort cost has a positive payoff. This payoff and the overall dissipation crucially depend on group composition.

Countries compete for new FDI investment, whereas stocks of FDI generate agglomeration benefits and are potentially subject to extortionary taxation. We study the interaction between these aspects in a simple vintage capital framework with discrete time and an infinite horizon, focussing on...

The formation of an alliance in conflict situations is known to suffer from a collective action problem and from the potential of internal conflict. We show that budget constraints of an intermediate size can overcome this strong disadvantage and explain the formation of alliances.

E. D. Domar and R. A. Musgrave (1944) showed that taxing the return from risky investments may encourage risk taking. The effect has come under attack as being one of partial analysis that would disappear in general equilibrium. This paper shows that the contrary is true if capital markets...

We study the residential choice of siblings who are altruistic towards their parents. The firstborn child's location choice influences the behavior of the second-born child and can shift some of the burden of providing care for the parents from one child to the other. These strategic...

Restrictions on work hours are more important in countries with a large welfare state. We show that this empirical observation is consistent with the strategic effects of such restrictions in a welfare state in the context of optimal direct taxation in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Our...

Contestants have to choose whether to initiate a contest or war, or whether to remain peaceful for another period. We find that agents wait and initiate the contest once their rival is sufficiently weak to be an easy target.

We study how norms can solve distributional conflict inside a clan and the efficient coordination of collective action in a conflict with an external enemy.We characterize a fully non-cooperative equilibrium in a finite game in which a self-enforcing norm coordinates the members on efficient...