This article considers the interaction between two types of effort in lobbying contests: effort that improves the contestant's own performance (standard rent seeking), and effort that reduces particular rivals' performance (sabotage). Due to a positive externality, sabotage is a 'small number'...

Evidence from early terrorist groups reveals a structural equivalence between extortion and terrorism. This allows us to draw conclusions from the theory of extortion that can be applied to a theory of terrorism concerning the role of repeated play in the viability of extortion. It also enables...

The study analyzes and predicts how individual preferences and majoritarian political decisions about the extent of paternalism in a society depend on the distribution of genuine preferences for economic activities, the distribution of information about these preferences, and the distribution of...

When politicians negotiate in international climate conventions they may suffer from incomplete information about each other's preferences about reaching an agreement. As is known, this may cause failure to reach an efficient cooperative agreement. We study the role of the clean development...

This paper considers evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) in a take-it-or-leave-it offer bargaining game with incomplete information. We find responders reject offers which yield a higher positive material payoff than their outside option. Proposers, in turn, make more attractive offers than...

We analyze bargaining over international climate agreements in a setting with incomplete information about abatement costs. Unilateral commitment to high abatement reduces the gains from global cooperation. This reduces the probability of reaching efficient international environmental agreements

We study the merger paradox, a relative of Harsanyi's bargaining paradox, in an experiment. We examine bilateral mergers in experimental Cournot markets with initially three or four firms. Standard Cournot-Nash equilibrium predicts total outputs well. However, merged firms produce significantly...