We analyse procurement auctions in which sellers are distinguished on the basis of the ratios of quality per unit of money that they offer. Sellers are privately informed on the offered quality of the technology or good. We assume that the procurer cannot perfectly identify the best offer. Thus,...

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

We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest - which we call a 'tax lottery' - can...

We develop the idea of using mean-variance preferences for the analysis of the first-price, all-pay auction. On the bidding side, we characterise the optimal strategy in symmetric all-pay auctions under mean-variance preferences for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders....