Contests, NGOs and Decentralizing Aid International donors usually have particular goals they want to achieve with their foreign aid, for example, poverty alleviation. In the international aid story lobbying by potential recipient groups attempting to capture the donor’s support play a potentially important role for nongovernmental organizations. We model this situation as a hierarchical contes...

Employer’s Information and Promotion-Seeking Activities This paper presents a model in which promotion of employees within the internal firm hierarchy is determined by the individuals’ allocation of time between promotion/rent-seeking and productive activity. We consider the effect of an increase in the employer’s knowledge (information) regarding the employees’ productivity levels on the total...

This paper analyzes voting on a linear income tax which is redistributed lump sum to the taxpayers. Individuals can evade taxes, which leads to penalties if evasion is detected. Since preferences satisfy neither single peakedness nor single crossing, an equilibrium may not exist. When it does exist, it may have interesting properties, in particular, the poor and the rich may form a coalition ag...

In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of the investment can decrease or increase the amount of investment. The results are applied to autocrats...

We compare two contest. Decentralized in which there are several independent contests with non overlapping contestants and Centralized in which all contestants …ght for a unique prize which is the sum of all prizes in the small contests. We study the relationship between payo¤s and e¤orts between these two contests. Keywords: Centralization, Decentralization, Contests JEL classi…cation: C72; D7...

In a common-values election with two candidates voters receive a signal about which candidate is superior. They can acquire information that improves the precision of the signal. Electors differ in their information acquisition costs. For large electorates a non negligible fraction of voters acquires information, but the quantity of informed voters and the quality of acquired information declin...

This paper studies, theoretically and experimentally, the effects of overconfidence fake news on information aggregation quality democratic choice in a common-interest setting. We show that exacerbates adverse widespread misinformation (i.e., news). then analyze richer models allow for partisanship, targeted intended to sway public opinion, signals correlated across voters (due media ownership ...

We ask whether attitudes toward government play a causal role in the evasion of US personal income taxes. As turnover elections move voters partisan counties into and out alignment with party president, we find (i) taxpayers report more easily evaded forms income; (ii) suspect EITC claims decrease; (iii) audits triggered found to owe additional tax decrease. Coupled evidence that leads favorabl...