We study decision making processes with non-standard all-pay structures. We motivate this interest through a group of regulatory, political, legal, military, and economic applications where individual actions determine the consequences for a larger group or the public. The common features of...

We propose a simple mechanism providing incentives to reduce harmful emissions to their efficient level without infracting upon productive efficiency. The mechanism employs a contest creating incentives among participating nations to simultaneously exert efficient productive and efficient...

We address the scheduling problem of reordering an existing queue into its efficient order through trade. To that end, we consider individually rational and balanced budget direct and indirect mechanisms. We show that this class of mechanisms allows us to form efficient queues provided that...

We attempt to answer a simple empirical question: does having children make a parent live longer? The hypothesis we offer is that a parent's immune system is refreshed by a child's infections at a time when their own protection starts wearing thin. With the boosted immune system, the parent has...

We study the alternating-offers bargaining problem of assigning an indivisible and commonly valued object to one of two players in return for some payment among players. The players are asymmetrically informed about the object's value and have veto power over any settlement. There is no...

We use a simple balanced budget contest to collect taxes on a private good in order to ?nance a pure public good. We show that-with an appropriately chosen structure of winning probabilities-this contest can provide the public good efficiently and without distorting private consumption. We...

We study the alternating-offer bargaining problem of sharing a common value pie under incomplete information on both sides and no depreciation between two identical players. We characterise the essentially unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium of this game which turns out to be in gradually...

We consider a Rothschild-Stiglitz-Spence labour market screening model and employ a centralised mechanism to coordinate the efficient matching of workers to firms. This mechanism can be thought of as operated by a recruitment agency, an employment office or head hunter. In a centralised...

We show that the optimal prize structure of symmetric n-player Tullock tournaments assigns the entire prize pool to the winner, provided that a symmetric pure strategy equilibrium exists. If such an equilibrium fails to exist under the winner-take-all structure, we construct the optimal prize...

We analyse the all-pay auction with incomplete information and variance-averse bidders. We characterise the symmetric equilibrium for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders. Variance aversion is a sufficient assumption to predict that high-valuation bidders increase their...