the litigious plaintiff hypothesis case selection and resolution the process through which cases are selected for litigation cannot be ignored because it yields a set of lawsuits and plaintiffs that is far from a random selection either of potential claims or of potential claimants we present a theoretical framework for understanding the operation of this suit selection process and its relationship to the underlying distribution of potential claims and claimants the model has implications for the trial rate and the plaintiff win rate at trial our empirical analysis using data on over 200 000 federal civil litigations yields results that are strongly consistent with the theory

strategic behavior in contests comment almost by definition contests involve strategy this is especially true in contests between unevenly matched contenders in a recent article avinash dixit 1987 explored strategic commitment in contests between a favorite and an underdog the favorite is defined as the player whose chance of victory exceeds one half at the nash equilibrium an underdog s chance is less than one half dixit concludes that if the favorite has the opportunity to move first then he will overcommit effort compared with the nash equilibrium an important implication of the favorite overcommitting effort is that strategic behavior leads to greater social costs see gordon tullock 1980 the opposite holds if the underdog has the opportunity to move first this paper demonstrates that the favorite will never overcommit effort given endogenous order of moves the favorite finds it advantageous to wait until the underdog moves surprisingly the underdog s best strategy is not to wait but to make the first move throwing the first punch the equilibrium order of play is for the underdog to move before the favorite in this equilibrium one never observes overcommitment of effort consequently extending dixit s model to allow for endogenous order of moves suggests that strategic behavior in contests will lead to undercommitment compared with nash behavior

war and natural resource exploitation abstract we build a theoretical framework that allows for endogenous conflict behaviour i e fighting efforts and for endogenous natural resource exploitation i e speed ownership and investments while depletion is spread in a balanced hotelling fashion during peace the presence of conflict creates incentives for rapacious extraction as this lowers the stakes of future contest this voracious extraction depresses total oil revenue especially if world oil demand is relatively elastic and the government s weapon advantage is weak some of these political distortions can be overcome by bribing rebels or by government investment in weapons the shadow of conflict can also make less efficient nationalized oil extraction more attractive than private extraction as insecure property rights create a holdup problem for the private firm and lead to a lower license fee furthermore the government fights less intensely than the rebels under private exploitation which leads to more government turnover without credible commitment to future fighting efforts private oil depletion is only lucrative if the government s non oil office rents are large and weaponry powerful which guarantees the government a stronger grip on office and makes the holdup problem less severe

truth effort and the legal battle in lawsuits relative success depends upon two main factors the true degree of fault and the efforts invested on eachside a proposed litigation success function displays thisdependence while satisfying other essential properties undertwo different protocols nash cournot and stackelberg solutions are obtained for the litigation efforts proportionate success and values of the lawsuit on each side outcomes are evaluated in terms of two normative criteria i achieving justice interpreted as equality between defendantfault and relative plaintiff success and ii minimizingaggregate litigation cost achievement of these aims isdetermined by the decisiveness of litigation effort relativeto true fault

strategic behavior in contests reply in my 1987 paper i modeled contests where the probability of each player winning a prize depends on all players efforts and examined the first order benefits to one player of making a commitment to a strategy slightly different from his nash equilibrium strategy in the special case of a two player symmetric contest i found that this first order effect was zero michael r baye and onsong shin 1999 have taken the useful further step of finding the second order conditions which ensure that the local stationary point is a local maximum they also find an example where such a commitment has a third order benefit whether this is of any substantive economic interest remains to be seen i used the phrase no local effect to mean zero first order effect which was clearly a sloppy use of language but some such restriction on the use of local is essential if the phrase x has no local effect on f x at x 5 a were to mean that all derivatives f a are zero then a taylor series expansion would show that f x 5 f a for all x and no local effect would be the same as no global effect most importantly symmetric contests were only a very special case of my model the focus was on the much more interesting and more general situation of asymmetry among the players where one player s commitment to a strategy different from his nash equilibrium strategy does bring him a first order benefit the favorite benefits by committing to excessive effort and the underdog from committing to too little others for example kyung h baik and jason f shogren 1992 have extended the analysis to endogenize the order of moves and found that it can be in the interests of both contestants to let the underdog make the commitment in my view these are the more interesting economic issues to do with contests than are third order effects in the symmetric case

endogenous timing in games of commercial policy this paper analyzes various equilibria associated with intervention in trade in the context of noncooperative policy games with endogenous timing it is shown that while the subgame perfect equilibria in quota games always involve sequential play that is not necessarily the case in tariff games one implication of the analysis is that in contrast to existing theory trade is not eliminated in quota games another implication is that quotas are not necessarily inferior to tariffs the paper also examines the ways policy leaders and followers differ in their preferences over instruments and allows the choice over instruments to be determined endogenously this paper analyses various equilibria associated with intervention in trade in the context on non cooperative policy games with endogenous timing it is shown that while the subgame perfect equilibria in quota games always involve sequential play that is not necessarily the case in tariff games one implication of the analysis is that in contrast to existing theory trade is not eliminated in quota games another implication is that quotas are not necessarily inferior to tariffs the paper also examines the ways policy leaders and followers differ in their preferences over instruments and allows the choice over instruments to be determined endogenously

imperfect patent protection and innovation the paper studies the effect of strengthening protection on r d incentives in the context of process innovation it shows that for non drastic innovations that do not render the pre existing technology obsolete the innovator might favor imitation if the expected royalty rate determined by the court is sufficiently high since imitation is discouraged for very high levels of patent protection r d investment is maximized for an intermediate level of patent strength this finding provides a theoretical explanation for emerging empirical evidence questioning the effectiveness of strengthening protection on innovation incentives it also serves as a justification for the imperfections of the existing patent system that allows for some infringement

contests with multiple rounds this paper studies contests where players have the flexibility to add to their previous efforts after observing their rivals most recent effort in an intermediate stage it is found that 1 contrary to previous findings the stackelberg outcome where the underdog leads and the favorite follows cannot be an equilibrium 2 there are multiple subgame perfect equilibria all occurring on the underdog s usual one shot reaction function in between and including the one shot cournot nash and stackelberg outcome with the favorite leading 3 the total equilibrium effort is typically greater than or equal to what a one shot cournot nash play would predict and 4 in settings where players can choose whether or not to disclose their early actions to the rival both the favorite and the underdog disclose in equilibrium applications in sports lobbying and r d races are discussed

shipwrecks and treasure hunters we examine dynamic search as a game in which two rivals explore an island for a hidden prize of known value in every period until its discovery the players decide how much of the unsearched area to comb if a player finds the prize alone he wins it and the game ends players have a per period discount factor and costs proportional to the area they search first as a benchmark for efficiency we solve the one player search problem second in the two player setting we show that typically there is inefficient over search a result akin to the tragedy of the commons however for players with intermediate levels of patience there is the possibility of inefficient under search as players incorporate the expected future payoffs in their current search decisions finally with patient players several counterintuitive results can arise for example players might be better off searching a larger island or looking for a less valuable prize

a general model of rent seeking for public goods this paper generalizes the model of collective rent seeking over a public good expanding the rent seeker s consumption bundle to include preferences over the public good and a private good our results suggest collective rent seeking is positively related to group size although free riding exists within a group there is not a one for one tradeoff in addition rent seeking increases with wealth finally total effort expended by both groups increases if either group increases in membership size except in the case of an extremely lopsided contest the key condition underlying these results is that the marginal utility of the public good is not inversely related to the private good

the strategic equivalence of rent seeking innovation and patent race games abstract we establish the strategic equivalence of a variety of rent seeking contests innovation tournaments and patent race games the results allow us to disentangle negative and positive externalities and to apply theorems and results intended for rent seeking games to other games and vice versa we conclude with several examples that highlight the practical utility of our results

on the endogeneity of cournot nash and stackelberg equilibria games of accumulation abstract we characterize equilibria of games with two properties i agents have the opportunity to adjust their strategic variable after their initial choices and before payoffs occur but ii they can only add to their initial amounts the equilibrium set consists of just the cournot nash outcome one or both stackelberg outcomes or a continuum of points including the cournot nash outcome and one or both stackelberg outcomes a simple theorem that uses agents standard one period reaction functions and the one period cournot nash and stackelberg equilibria delineates the equilibrium set applications include contribution oligopoly and rent seeking games

distributional preferences in probabilistic and share contests we analyze nash equilibria of probabilistic and share contests where players have distributional preferences if players are sufficiently similar distributional preferences create multiple equilibria for the case of only mildly heterogeneous players equilibrium effort can be lower as well as higher than effort exerted by players with selfish preferences these findings can explain the following three anomalies observed in empirical tests of probabilistic and share contests the large variance of effort levels overspreading individual spending that exceeds the nash equilibrium prediction overspending and aggregate spending that exceeds the value of the prize overdissipation if players are sufficiently heterogeneous the game has a unique equilibrium that is more egalitarian than the selfish nash equilibrium it turns out that the less talented competitor may win the larger share of the prize if his inequality aversion is sufficiently strong we analyze how the equilibria evolve if the number of players becomes larger and how sequential moves influence behavior two new insights follow from the analysis of the sequential move game first sequential moves act as a coordination device in case of multiple simultaneous equilibria and second inequality aversion of the more egalitarian player can be used as a commitment device for low effort this effect can reverse the conventional wisdom that the underdog should lead

war labor tournaments and contest payoffs abstract when prizes change with effort contestants adjust effort to mitigate that change net payoffs remain unchanged respectively can be larger if prizes are linear concave in effort contest designers can facilitate desired outcomes by making the prize concave in effort

endogenous timing in contests with delegation i introduction contests with delegation where each player hires a delegate to expend effort or resources on the player s behalf to win a prize are common 1 an example is litigation between a plaintiff and a defendant in which each litigant hires an attorney who expends his effort to win the lawsuit on behalf of his client another example is a rent seeking contest in which each firm hires a lobbyist who expends his effort to acquire a monopoly or a procurement contract from the government on behalf of his client yet another example is a patent contest in which each firm hires a group of independent researchers or university professors who conduct research to obtain a patent on behalf of their employer delegation is attractive to players because they each can use superior ability by hiring a delegate with more ability than herself and achieve strategic commitments through delegation in such contests with delegation we believe delegates decide endogenously when to expend their effort after signing delegation contracts indeed pursuing their self interest the delegates may well endogenize the order of their moves and communicate it with each other before they expend their effort we believe also that players take it into account when designing their contracts for the delegates that the delegates will endogenize the order of their moves it is these ideas that motivate this paper accordingly the purpose of this paper is to systematically study contests with delegation in which delegates decide endogenously when to expend their effort after signing delegation contracts and before they expend their effort we study two player contests with delegation focusing on not only the equilibrium delegation contracts between players and their delegates but also the equilibrium orders of the delegates moves specifically we set up and analyze the following three stage game in the first stage two players each hire a delegate and they simultaneously announce their contracts written with their delegates each player s contract specifies how much her delegate will be paid if he wins the contest and how much if he loses it in the second stage each delegate decides when to expend his effort and the delegates announce their decisions simultaneously in the third stage the delegates expend their effort according to their decisions in the second stage to win the prize on behalf of their employers we show that in equilibrium the delegate hired by the higher valuation player chooses his effort level after observing his counterpart s and his expected payoff is greater than that of his counterpart this advantage of the delegate of the higher valuation player can be explained by the fact that his employer the higher valuation player offers better contingent compensation as it will be defined in section ii to him than the lower valuation player does to her delegate we compare the outcomes of the endogenous timing framework the three stage game presented above with those of the simultaneous move framework the game which is the same as the three stage game with the exception that the delegates choose their effort levels simultaneously and this order of their moves is given exogenously an interesting result is that each player offers her delegate a better contract in the endogenous timing framework than in the simultaneous move framework another interesting result is that unless the valuation for the prize of the higher valuation player is significantly greater than that of the lower valuation player then each delegate s expected payoff is greater in the endogenous timing framework than in the simultaneous move framework whereas each player s expected payoff is less in the endogenous timing framework than in the simultaneous move framework in summary pursuing their self interest the delegates decide endogenously when to expend their effort given contracts between the players and the delegates

spillovers among sovereign debt markets identification through absolute magnitude restrictions this paper studies spillovers among us and european sovereign yields we employ absolute magnitude restrictions on the impact matrix to identify the countries that were the main sources of spillovers despite the large size of shocks from euro area stressed countries connectedness among sovereign yields declined between 2008 and 2012 due to financial fragmentation particularly between countries with more divergent business and fiscal cycles we show that none of the sovereign yields were insulated from foreign shocks and that shocks to the greek bond market in 2010 explained 20 30 of the variance of sovereign yields in stressed countries while in 2011 2012 italy not spain was the source of systemic risk

free entry and efficient rent seeking this paper concerns rent seeking and the extent to which rents are dissipated under various circumstances gordon tullock s 1967 insight that expenditures made to capture an artificially created transfer represent a social waste suggested that the cost to the economy of monopoly and regulation is greater than the simple harberger 1954 deadweight loss indeed under tullock s original formulation and in the extensions of his work by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 rents are exactly dissipated at the social level 1 is spent to capture 1 so that the total welfare loss from such activities is equal to the harberger triangle plus the rectangle of monopoly profits

srisk a conditional capital shortfall measure of systemic risk we introduce srisk to measure the systemic risk contribution of a financial firm srisk measures the capital shortfall of a firm conditional on a severe market decline and is a function of its size leverage and risk we use the measure to study top financial institutions in the recent financial crisis srisk delivers useful rankings of systemic institutions at various stages of the crisis and identifies fannie mae freddie mac morgan stanley bear stearns and lehman brothers as top contributors as early as 2005 q1 moreover aggregate srisk provides early warning signals of distress in indicators of real activity received june 7 2011 accepted april 18 2016 by editor geert bekaert

deterrence in contests this paper explores the role of deterrence in contests as a general rule we show that for a deterrence strategy to be played by rational agents it is necessary that the contest be destructive we show for a very general class of functions that pure strategy deterrence equilibria where contestants deter one another do not exist a corollary of this finding is that under fairly general conditions agents should always be expected to engage in contests applied to international relations our results imply that war is always a potential outcome despite deterrence attempts

risk attitudes and heterogeneity in simultaneous and sequential contests we prove existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in rent seeking contests in which players are heterogeneous in both risk preferences and production technology given identical linear production technology if the number of risk loving players is large enough the aggregate investment in equilibrium will exceed the rent and all risk neutral and risk averse players will exit the contest in simultaneous and sequential contests with two players we can identify the favorite and underdog based on both players preference parameters our theoretical results suggest that subjects in some recent contest experiments behaved as if they were risk loving

transfer seeking and avoidance on the full social costs of rent seeking we would like to thank gordon tullock and an anonymous referee of this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a two stage model of research and development with endogenous second mover advantages this paper describes a simple two stage model of research and development in which the winner of the research stage has the option of moving first in the development stage some unexpected results emerge in equilibrium the leader in the development stage invests less than each follower and is consequently least likely to collect the patent moreover the leader receives a lower expected payoff than each of the followers thus there are endogenous second mover advantages using a game of timing in which the identity of the stackelberg leader is determined to link the two stages i find that firms face quite different incentives in the research stage although the leader invests less than each follower in the research stage as well the leader enjoys higher expected revenue from the complete two stage game than does each follower the equilibrium is inefficient because there is a lag between the time at which research is completed and the time at which development is begun and because aggregate investment is inefficiently asymmetrically distributed across firms

legal fee restrictions moral hazard and attorney rents abstract when attorney effort is unobservable and certain other simplifying assumptions such as risk neutrality hold it is efficient for an attorney to purchase the rights to a client s legal claim however the american bar association model rules of professional conduct prohibit this arrangement we show that this ethical restriction which is formally equivalent to requiring a minimum fixed fee of zero can create economic rents for attorneys even though they continue to compete along the contingent fee dimension the contingent fee is not bid down to the zero profit level because such a fee does not induce sufficient attorney effort we thereby provide a political economy explanation for these restrictions

contests with multi tasking the standard contest model in which participants compete in a single dimension is well understood and documented multi dimension extensions are possible but are liable to increase the complexity of the contest structure mitigating one of its main advantages simplicity in this paper we propose an extension in which competition ensues in several dimensions and a competitor that wins a certain number of these is awarded a prize the amount of information needed to run the contest is hence limited to the number of dimensions won by each player we look at the design of this contest from the point of view of maximising effort in the contest per dimension and totally and show that there will be a tendency to run small contests with few dimensions the standard tullock model and its results are encompassed by our framework

legal expenditure as a rent seeking game legal expenditures at a civil trial constitute an interesting type of rent seeking contest in civil litigation there is a natural interaction between the objective merits of the case and the outcome of the contest institutions such as fee shifting do not generally have a counterpart in other rent seeking contests the endogenous decision to participate in the rent seeking contest corresponds to the decision by the plaintiff to bring a case and the decision by the defendant to defend it the desirability of fee shifting is very sensitive to the value of the parameter which describes the legal technology

seeking rents by setting rents the political economy of rent seeking in recent years there has been a large number of papers on the subject of rent seeking most such works on rent seeking have taken the rent as exogenously determined by regulators regulators howeve r may also be expected and indeed have been shown to be rent seeke rs and hence the determination of the rent itself should be endogeniz ed to reflect the fact that the rent setters are themselves rent se ekers in this paper the authors do this by presenting an analysis o f the interaction of regulators firms and consumers within a rent s eeking framework where all three groups are assumed to be self motiva ted the analysis is carried out under alternative assumptions regard ing the nature of the market and the reaction functions of the partic ipants policy implications are drawn where appropriate copyright 1987 by royal economic society

the dynamics of pretrial negotiation it is shown that many cases proceed to court despite ample opportunity for interaction and much of the settlement takes place on the courthouse steps the deadline effect when fixed costs of bargaining are introduced a u shaped pattern of settlement appears with a greater chance of settlement at the beginning and at the end of negotiations than in the middle these characteristics persist even as the time between offers approaches zero the theoretical predictions are consistent with the stylized facts a large proportion of the lawsuits that are settled out of court are settled very close to the trial date or in the first several days of the trial 3 although the deadline effect appears in many other settings as well it has little theoretical support 4

what s yours is mine rent seeking and the common law the paper develops a rent seeking theory of the common law the general finding is that the law s form depends on thecomparative advantage each group has in production versusappropriation generally and appropriation via litigation inparticular the model generates new interpretations ofdevelopments in united states common law and is used both tosupplement and to criticize two dominant theories of such law the efficiency theory associated with the law and economicsmovement and that generated by critical legal studiesscholars

factor decomposition of the eurozone sovereign cds spreads in the present study we examine the factors driving eurozone sovereign credit default swap cds spreads during the eurozone sovereign debt crisis for identifying factors we utilize independent component analysis ica a technique similar to principal component analysis pca we identify three factors that impact spreads and capture the features specific to the crisis such as the breakup risk of the eurozone peripheral factor global factor and eurozone common factor in contrast when pca is applied only a single factor is identified moreover using ica with a garch model we show that the source of volatility for cds spreads shifted from the global factor in 2009 and the peripheral factor in 2010 to the eurozone common factor in 2012 and that the dynamic correlation reflects the decoupling between low credit risk countries such as germany and high credit risk countries such as greece we also show that the goodness of fit of the ica based model is better than other models used such as the student s t copula model

misinformed speculators and mispricing in the housing market this paper examines the contribution of out of town second house buyers to mispricing in the housing market we show that demand from out of town second house buyers during the mid 2000s predicted not only house price appreciation rates but also implied to actual rent ratio appreciation rates a proxy for mispricing we then apply a novel identification strategy to address the issue of reverse causality we give supporting evidence that out of town second house buyers behaved like misinformed speculators earning lower capital gains misinformed and consuming smaller dividends speculators

on the evolution of prize perceptions in contests abstract we apply an indirect evolutionary approach to players perceived prize valuations in contests evolution in finite populations leads to preferences that overstate the prize s material value and induce overexpenditure we establish an equivalence between evolutionarily stable strategies and the behavior induced by evolutionarily stable preferences

inefficiency as a strategic device in group contests against dominant opponents i introduction many strategic situations in economics and politics can be understood as contests rd nitzan and ueda 2009 a private good nitzan 1991a 1991b nitzan and ueda 2009 or a mixed good esteban and ray 2001 nitzan and ueda 2011 to a large extent the intensity of free riding or conversely the motivation for individuals to exert effort in a contest is shaped by the intra group incentive scheme or governance structure in standard contests incentives are inseparably linked to the sharing rule i e to the usually exogenous procedure by which the rents acquired in the contest are distributed within the group 1 in a number of economic applications however incentives to exert effort appear to be separate or are even willfully separated from the sharing rule phenomena such as team spirit akerlof and kranton 2005 identification with the group sherif 1966 bornstein and ben yossef 1994 peer pressure kandel and lazear 1992 or social norms to contribute to the social good elster 1989 are examples for this separation alternatively groups could apply selective incentive schemes based on relative performance lazear and rosen 1981 or marginally align individual and group incentives nitzan and ueda 2009 in all these scenarios individuals behave cooperatively i e in the interest of the entire group even if the final distribution of rents follows a standard sharing rule mechanisms to induce cooperation often are costly sanchez pages and straub 2010 may only work under restrictive conditions che and gale 2003 require strategic coordination among individuals hardin 1995 or cannot be ensured to be obeyed unanimously oliver 1980 this might explain why they do not emerge universally or automatically the point we make in this article is even stronger even if there existed perfect and costless solutions to within group free riding problems which will henceforth be called intra group efficient incentive schemes igeis they might not always be adopted why would a group for which an igeis is freely available not wish to utilize it but rather adopt an apparently inefficient governance structure by definition an igeis internalizes all within group externalities and seems to be a safe way to increase one s payoffs however this reasoning ignores repercussions that arise in strategic environments like contests suppose for example that the competing groups have sufficiently unequal strengths say due to unequal sizes or different comparative advantages then the weaker group may refrain from implementing a costless igeis to avoid the contest from heating up adoption of an igeis makes a group more efficient and consequently more aggressive in the contest on one hand higher efforts constitute a cost on the other they affect the share of the rent that this group can hope to acquire or the likelihood of succeeding in the contest 2 an igeis clearly enhances a group s prospects if the other group did not change its behavior however if members of the opponent group reply with a sufficiently strong increase in their contest efforts this diminishes and may potentially more than offset the gains from one s own increased efforts whether this happens depends on the direction of the strategic interaction between groups the detrimental firing back effect can only become relevant if the other group s efforts are sufficiently strong strategic complements to one s own efforts

understanding gentrification an empirical analysis of the determinants of urban housing renovation abstract the back to the city phenomenon presented an unpredicted countercurrent in the prevalent tide of suburbanization and this process of upper income resettlement in the inner city has been thoroughly analyzed in the urban economic literature housing renovation a process that always accompanies gentrification and constitutes a significant portion of residential housing investment has been studied much less contrary to the expectation that location matters the existing empirical studies have concluded that most neighborhood amenities and structural attributes are insignificant as determinants of renovation using a detailed parcel level data set that documents all residential renovation activity in chicago between 1995 and 2000 this paper establishes that the characteristics of a building and its neighborhood do indeed influence the likelihood that it will be renovated

efficient rent seeking under varying cost structures the rent seeking paradigm which was introduced by tullock 1967 has proven useful for exploring a variety of economic decisions that lie outside the traditional profit maximizing framework early applications of tullock s insight becker 1968 krueger 1974 posner 1975 demsetz 1976 foster 1981 and others usually assumed the entire value of the rent would be dissipated by competition following the fashion of economic profits in competitive markets in 1980 tullock structured a simple game reflecting the decisions made in rent seeking the results generated by his model suggest residual rents may accrue to rent seekers and under certain conditions resist dissipation a number of studies followed tullock s 1980 paper corcoran 1984 corcoran and karels 1985 higgins shugart and tollison 1985 tullock 1984 1985 and 1987 which explore the dissipation of excess rents under various assumptions

conflict and rent seeking success functions ratio vs difference models of relative success the rent seeking competitions studied by economists fall within a much broader category of conflict interactions that also includes military combats election campaigns industrial disputes lawsuits and sibling rivalries in the rent seeking literature each party s success pi which can be interpreted either as the probability of victory or as the proportion of the prize won has usually been taken to be a function of the ratio of the respective resource commitments alternatively however pi may instead be a function of the difference between the parties commitments to the contest the contest success function csf for the difference from is a logistic curve in which as is consistent with military experience increasing returns apply up to an inflection point at equal resource commitments a crucial flaw of the traditional ratio model is that neither onesided submission nor two sided peace between the parties can ever occur as a cournot equilibrium in contrast both of these outcomes are entirely consistent with a model in which success is a function of the difference between the parties resource commitments

capital shortfall a new approach to ranking and regulating systemic risks the financial crisis of 2007 2009 has given way to the sovereign debt crisis of 2010 2012 yet many of the banking issues remain the same we discuss a method to estimate the capital that a financial firm would need to raise if we have another financial crisis this measure of capital shortfall is based on publicly available information but is conceptually similar to the stress tests conducted by us and european regulators we argue that this measure summarizes the major characteristics of systemic risk and provides a reliable interpretation of the past and current financial crises

redenomination risk spillovers in the eurozone abstract in this paper we use sovereign quanto cds spreads as proxy for redenomination risk in the eurozone i e the risk of a sovereign default obtained by the redenomination of debt in a different currency quanto cds spreads are the difference between the cds quotes in u s dollars and euros we capture spillovers with c o v a r a risk indicator proposed by adrian and brunnermeier 2016 that measures the difference between the value at risk of country i conditional on a state of distress in country j and the median state our sample starts on the onset of the great recession we find that belgium ireland italy and spain are the only eurozone countries exposed to redenomination risk spillovers however in the shorter post omt sample the only vulnerable countries are italy and spain

systemic risk measurement multivariate garch estimation of covar abstract we modify adrian and brunnermeier s 2011 covar the var of the financial system conditional on an institution being in financial distress we change the definition of financial distress from an institution being exactly at its var to being at most at its var this change allows us to consider more severe distress events to backtest covar and to improve its consistency monotonicity with respect to the dependence parameter we define the systemic risk contribution of an institution as the change from its covar in its benchmark state defined as a one standard deviation event to its covar under financial distress we estimate the systemic risk contributions of four financial industry groups consisting of a large number of institutions for the sample period june 2000 to february 2008 and the 12 months prior to the beginning of the crisis we also investigate the link between institutions contributions to systemic risk and their characteristics

conflict settlement and the shadow of the future abstract we examine a conflictual setting in which adversaries cannot contract on an enforcement variable arms and where the future strategic positions of adversaries are very different when there is open conflict than when there is settlement we show that as the future becomes more important in this setting open conflict becomes more likely than settlement we demonstrate the theoretical robustness of this finding and test it in a laboratory experiment as predicted we find that subjects are more likely to engage in destructive conflict as the future becomes more important

long run equilibrium and total expenditures in rent seeking a comment although corcoran is mathematically correct i believe his comment is not very helpful in order to discuss the matter in some detail the reader should consult table 7 1 from my original efficient rent seeking reproduced on page 92 1 this shows the equilibrium investment of each individual different numbers of individuals playing the game n and differing values of r table 7 2 also reproduced on page 93 shows the total investment

a general analysis of rent seeking games in this paper we reconsider the basic model of efficient rent seeking we stress the importance of the shape of the players reaction curve in order to understand the impact of the technology of rent seeking on the structure of the outcome of the game we give a complete characterization of the pure strategy equilibria moreover the possibility of preemption by a stakelberg leader is discussed according to the nature of the technology of rent seeking available to the agents

efficient rents 1 rent seeking behavior in the long run we have analyzed long run behavior in rent seeking under several conditions and behavioral hypotheses the question of interest is whether or not the long run expenditures will exactly equal the value of the rents our results depend on the type of competitive response which is assumed to exist in the long run and on the r value governing the probability of winning

a generalized tullock contest we construct a generalized tullock contest under complete information where contingent upon winning or losing the payoff of a player is a linear function of prizes own effort and the effort of the rival this structure nests a number of existing contests in the literature and can be used to analyze new types of contests we characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium and show that small parameter modifications may lead to substantially different types of contests and hence different equilibrium effort levels

strategic investment with asymmetric spillovers this paper investigates the implications of asymmetric spillovers on noncooperative strategic investments in a duopoly with quadratic pay offs a unique equilibrium in the announcement of the leader follower role exists in the case where one firm absorbs large spillovers while the other at most is able to receive only small spillovers the leader in this equilibrium is the firm that absorbs the large spillovers other asymmetries in initial costs or efficiency in research and development do not affect this outcome

orchestrating rent seeking contests contests have different sometimes quite complex organisational structures in particular while most of the existing literature focusses on simultaneous contests multistage contests are also quite frequently encountered this paper seeks to provide a rationale for the latter by endogenising the choice of a contest structure which is made by an organiser of a contest interested in maximising the efforts expended by the contenders

strategic decisions on lawyers compensation in civil disputes i introduction a plaintiff and a defendant usually bargain to settle a civil dispute when they cannot reach a settlement the case goes to trial naturally through the settlement and trial stages the litigants behave strategically a few researchers study such a situation by developing contest models 1 examples include plott 1987 katz 1988 farmer and pecorino 1999 wfirneryd 2000 and hirshleifer and osborne 2001 there exists however some discrepancy between the contest models and the mainstream articles in the law and economics literature the contest models deal with the legal battle itself to use the words of hirshleifer and osborne 2001 by contrast the mainstream articles focus on one or some of the important aspects of the negotiation and litigation process such as the likelihood of settlement the reasons for lawsuits the efficient levels of precautions the burden of proof the comparison of alternative fee shifting systems and the compensation for lawyers in the presence of an agency problem 2 this article attempts to reconcile the two strands a bit further to do so we develop a contest model in which the negotiation and litigation stages are combined as in the previous contest models but unlike the previous ones two lawyers one for a plaintiff and the other for a defendant are introduced using this contest model with delegation we are able to analyze some of the important issues in legal disputes for instance a plaintiffs lawyer in the united states routinely charges one third of the award if his client wins and nothing if his client loses a natural question which we can address using our model is then why the lawyer s contingent fee is not one half of the award nor two thirds but one third using our model we can also address the following issues does the plaintiff have an incentive to choose an hourly fee arrangement if feasible does delegation to the lawyers increase the total legal expenditure of the plaintiff and defendant compared with the case of no delegation why do a plaintiff and a defendant hire lawyers in litigation a straightforward reason for such delegation is that a litigant can benefit by hiring a lawyer who has more capacity than herself throughout the article we use she to refer to a litigant and he to refer to a lawyer another explanation is that a litigant can benefit by achieving strategic commitments through delegation specifically the litigant can change her opponent s behavior in her favor by using a lawyer whose objective function differs from hers baik and kim 1997 consider a contest model that carries both aspects of delegation for the first time in the delegation literature but the idea that strategic delegation benefits a main player has long been emphasized in many contexts examples include schelling 1960 fershtman and judd 1987 katz 1991 and warneryd 2000 this article extends the delegation model of baik and kim 1997 to the case where a plaintiffs lawyer works on a contingent fee basis but a defendant s lawyer on an hourly fee basis 3 we assume that the litigants and lawyers are risk neutral to be more precise our two stage game runs as follows in the first stage knowing that the defendant adopts the hourly fee the plaintiff determines the contingent fee fraction for her lawyer and announces it publicly in the second stage the lawyers exert their effort simultaneously and independently to win the lawsuit the plaintiff s lawyer chooses the effort level on his own but the effort level of the defendant s lawyer is chosen by the defendant the defendant has to incur a monitoring cost because she hires her lawyer under the hourly fee we use logit form probability of winning functions after solving for the subgame perfect equilibrium of the game we first derive the condition on relevant parameters under which delegation to the lawyers brings both litigants more payoffs compared with the case of no delegation

give peace a chance the effect of ownership and asymmetric information on peace abstract we study the possibility of peace when two countries fight a war over the ownership of a resource war is always the outcome of the game played by rational countries under complete or asymmetric information when there is no pre established distribution of the resource among countries when there is such a distribution of the resource under complete information peace is feasible for some initial distributions of the resource whereas under asymmetric information there are two classes of equilibria peaceful equilibria in which peace has a positive probability and aggressive equilibria which assign probability one to war surprisingly a little asymmetric information may yield war

asymmetry and corrective public policy in contests the proposal of an inefficient policyusually stimulates a political strugglebetween the affected interest groups theresulting wasteful lobbying activities mayreduce welfare even if the proposed policyis not approved in this paper weshow that sufficient asymmetry in payoffsnot only tends to reduce lobbying effortsin standard rent seeking contests as iswell known but it is in fact a necessarycondition for the implementation of asuccessful effective correctivetax transfer policy that complements theproposal of the inefficient policy such apolicy induces an efficient equilibriumoutcome which is in addition optimal fromthe viewpoint of the players that take partin the public policy game

long run equilibrium and total expenditures in rent seeking the lure of excess profits or rents associated with monopoly power gives rise to expenditures to obtain these rents competitive rent seeking behavior is recognized as a factor which must be included among the wastes associated with monopoly power tullock 1967 posner 1975 1 the expenditures are aimed at transferring wealth rather than its creation and the use of resources to obtain this transfer is a loss to society how important rent seeking is as a part of the total monopolistic waste hinges on the size of the total expenditures induced by a given level of excess profits

distribution of surplus in sequential bargaining with endogenous recognition i examine a sequential bargaining situation in which agents contest the right to propose an allocation the contest can either take place at a pre bargaining stage yielding persistent recognition to propose or recur throughout the bargaining yielding transitory recognition equilibrium analysis reveals that surplus is distributed more unequally under persistent recognition social cost is higher under persistent recognition if and only if it attracts a sufficient number of active bargainers and individual s incentive to propose under transitory recognition may actually increase in the number of agents while this incentive always diminishes under persistent recognition

to fight or not to fight an analysis of submission struggle and the design of contests this paper considers the players behaviour in an asymmetric two player contest when do they decide to struggle and when to subjugate analysing contest success functions it is found that two crucial prerequisites for struggle or war have to be met thus such an equilibrium is possible but restrictive if a self interested rule setter chooses the contest success function endogenously we show that one player will always subjugate applications to rent seeking and environmental regulation are discussed

economies of scope and scale in green advocacy environmental advocacy is a large and growing activity whilst a number of economists have analysed the advocacy process no systematic attempt has been made to understand the factors influencing the organisation of the sector we explore the relationship between economies of scale and scope in advocacy under the most popular specification of a tullock type contest economies of scope arise when and only when the scale of that activity is sufficiently large the incentives for merger are socially efficient implying no need for policy intervention

no win no fee some economics of contingent legal fees mark up in different types of case is to be issued after consultation with professional bodies american style share contracts whereby the lawyer is paid a proportion of the award if the case is won and nothing if it is lost will continue to be unenforceable at law and prohibited by the professional bodies the introduction of contingency fees in england and wales has been discussed in a number of official and semi official reports without any consensus emerging 3 we use a formal model of the litigation process to analyse the implications of contingent fees under both english and united states cost shifting rules in the model potential defendants can take care to avoid accidents which impose losses on potential plaintiffs if an accident occurs the defendant is sued by the plaintiff and makes a settlement offer if the plaintiff rejects the offer the case proceeds to trial plaintiffs who win at trial are awarded damages and under english rules costs against the defendant lawyer client contracts can be evaluated by the extent to which they a compensate plaintiffs after an accident by making it easy to sue and obtain redress b induce settlements rather than costly trials and c provide

contests a comparison of timing and information structures we study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents we consider four institutional settings contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information we find that an effort maximizing designer of the contest prefers the sequential to the simultaneous setting from an ex ante perspective moreover the sequential contest pareto dominates the simultaneous one when the contestants types are sufficiently negatively correlated regarding the information structure the designer ex ante prefers private information while the contestants prefer public information

on being asset constrained in litigation contests this paper establishes that being asset constrained may be advantageous for defendants in litigation contests an active asset constraint of defendants i may increase decrease defendant plaintiff contest effort ii may lower the sum of plaintiff and defendant contest effort iii lowers expected defendant payment and iv makes a symmetric contest asymmetric

endogenous timing in the presence of non monotonicities the aim of this paper is to generalize the endogenous timing game proposed by hamilton and slutsky games and economic behavior 1990 2 pp 29 46 by allowing the payoff or the marginal payoff of a player to become non monotonic with respect to the strategy of the opponent we propose a taxonomy of the subgame perfect nash equilibria based on the characteristics of the payoff functions proposed by eaton canadian journal of economics 2004 37 pp 805 29 we determine under which conditions of the initial payoff functions commitment has a social value and when the simultaneous move nash equilibrium is commitment robust and discuss its pareto efficiency

contest efforts in light of behavioural considerations this study shows that distortion of probabilities is a possible reason for rent under dissipation incontests with relatively small number of participants such distortion may also result however inover dissipation of the contested rent focusing on contests with homogeneous contestants and thecommonly studied contest success function our main results clarify under what circumstances i rents are more under dissipated relative to the standard situation where probabilities are notdistorted ii rents are under dissipated yet less intensely relative to the standard situation whereprobabilities are not distorted iii rents are over dissipated and iv the contest does not possess asymmetric interior equilibrium in pure strategies

in defense of lawyers moral hazard as an aid to cooperation abstract this paper studies strategic delegation in two player contests for an indivisible prize as in e g litigation where one party s probability of winning is determined by the relative investments of both even though neither player stands to gain anything from precommitment both players ex ante prefer compulsory representation by agents e g lawyers whose efforts are unobservable this delegation equilibrium is unaffected by secret renegotiation opportunities equivalently it does not matter whether contracts are observable or not hence the paper points out a role for delegation with moral hazard in facilitating cooperation an effect quite separate from precommitment journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d72 d82 k41

speculating on home improvements we develop a speculation based theory of home improvements housing services are produced from a mix of land and structures homeowners have an option to increase their structures i e make improvements holding xed their land speculative improvements arise because overcondent homeowners mistakenly believe they can add to structures for a lower cost than a competitive construction industry improvements are increasing and convex in home prices there is excessive home remodeling in equilibrium and the change in the recoup ratio the ratio of resale value of improvements to construction costs is negatively correlated with construction cost growth controlling for home price appreciation we provide evidence consistent with our theory using data on the costs and recoup values of remodeling projects across u s cities

effort levels in a cournot nash contest with asymmetric information abstract many contests exist where one player does not know his opponent s value of a fixed prize e g unobservable non market preferences for preservation this paper explores how changes in the nature of a one sided information asymmetry affect effort levels in a cournot nash contest the results indicate that the uninformed player s effort is an uncertain input such that his effort is inversely related to risk this reduces his average odds of success comparative static results are driven by the perceived odds of success and risk for the uninformed player and the actual odds of success for the informed player

contingent fees meet the british rule an exploratory study compensation schemes in which lawyer s fees are contingent on winning the suit are becoming increasingly popular throughout europe at the same time the british rule of legal cost allocation is applicable in many european countries as a result it is of policy relevance how their coexistence may be harmonized this paper uses the litigation contest framework to analyze the consequences of three different cost allocation regimes if a plaintiff s attorney is compensated on a contingent fee basis we compare the equilibrium contest effort justice and payoffs for affected parties in the different regimes and find arguments in favor of not reimbursing contingent fees

gauging potential sovereign risk contagion in europe abstract this study adopts the covar methodology to analyse the tail risk relationships among european sovereigns which provide arguably important information for policymakers to identify countries that should come under close scrutiny during the current debt crisis

asset float and speculative bubbles we model the relationship between asset float tradeable shares and speculative bubbles investors with heterogeneous beliefs and short sales constraints trade a stock with limited float because of insider lockups a bubble arises as price overweighs optimists beliefs and investors anticipate the option to resell to those with even higher valuations the bubble s size depends on float as investors anticipate an increase in float with lockup expirations and speculate over the degree of insider selling consistent with the internet experience the bubble turnover and volatility decrease with float and prices drop on the lockup expiration date

bidding for a group specific public good prize abstract we examine the equilibrium effort levels of individual players and groups in a contest in which two groups compete with each other to win a group specific public good prize the players choose their effort levels simultaneously and independently and the winning group is determined by the selection rule of all pay auctions we first prove nonexistence of a pure strategy nash equilibrium and then construct a mixed strategy nash equilibrium at the nash equilibrium the only active player in each group is a player whose valuation for the prize is the highest in that group all the other players expend zero effort and the equilibrium effort levels depend solely on two values the highest valuation for the prize in each group

to deter or to moderate alliance formation in contests with incomplete information we consider two players choice about the formation of an alliance ahead of conflict in a framework with incomplete information about the strength of the potential ally when deciding on alliance formation players anticipate the self selection of other players and the informational value of own and other players choices in the absence of these signaling effects strong players have an incentive to stand alone which leads to a separating equilibrium this separating equilibrium can be destabilized by deception incentives if beliefs are updated on the basis of endogenous alliance formation choices weak players may find it attractive to appear strong in order to deter competitors from positive effort choices strong players may find it attractive to appear weak in order to give their competitors a false sense of security and then beat them with little effort moreover appearing weak allows players to free ride when alliances are formed jel d72 d74

endogenous timing in general rent seeking and conflict models we examine simultaneous versus sequential choice of effort in a two player contest the timing of moves determined in a preplay stage prior to the contest subgame as well as the value of the prize is allowed to be endogenous contrary to endogenous timing models with an exogenously fixed prize the present paper finds the following 1 players may decide to choose their effort simultaneously in the subgame perfect equilibrium spe of the extended game 2 the spe does not need to be unique in particular there is no unique spe with sequential moves if the direct costs of effort are zero 3 symmetry among players does not rule out incentives for precommitment to effort locally away from the cournot nash level 4 finally there may be no correlation between win probability and strategic incentives in our framework a finding most central in the analysis of fixed prize contests

strategic behavior in contests comment in an influential paper avinash dixit 1987 considers a class of symmetric two player contests in which each player s effort xi influences the probability of winning a prize valued at k 0 letting p x1 x2 denote the probability 1 that player 1 wins the expected payoffs of the two players are p1 5 p x1 x2 k 2 x1 and p2 5 1 2 p x1 x2 k 2 x2 dixit s main result is that if there is perfect symmetry between the players and each player s effort has a positive but diminishing marginal effect on his or her probability of winning i e

efficient rents 2 free entry and efficient rent seeking in the competition for a monopoly right in which the number of bidders is fixed tullock and others have found the value of the resources spent in the aggregate to capture the transfer to be sometimes less than and sometimes greater than the value of the monopoly we think this approach to be incomplete since it leaves unanswered the question of what determines the number of individuals who will vie for the right to be the monopolist it is unsatisfactory to imagine for example that the franchisor sets the number of contestants one could then foresee that rent seeking would arise to influence the permissible number of bidders and this merely moves the rent seeking dissipation question one step back