This paper shows how uninformed but rational voters can respond intelligently to political advertising.

The paper models a situation where a candidate must rely on a pressure group for financing political advertising. The pressure group uses its power over the purse to influence the position chosen by the candidate. Nevertheless, when uninformed voters use a strategic rule of thumb, pressure-group contributions always move the outcome of the election closer to the median voter. By using such a rule of thumb, when there is advertising, uninformed voters can have the same influence on the election as informed voters.

We consider an election that is solely concerned with redistribution of income. It is well known that when voters are selfish, there is no political equilibrium. We consider the case where voters are modestly altruistic. We demonstrate that modest altruism results in a unique political equilibrium. We also provide an explanation for why voters are much more altruistic than individuals acting alone.

Religions are organized in a variety of ways. They may resemble an elected autocracy, aparliamentary democracy, or something akin to a monarchy, where heredity plays aprimary role. This variation allows for a comparative study of their organization.These differing power arrangements call for different types of strategic behavior in thefight for control over church doctrine and finance. And they also induce different institutional responses. I show where screening is highly institutionalized and when the age of a person may be an important strategic factor in choosing a leader. I am thus able to explain what otherwise would be very puzzling differences in the age of appointment across religions and within a particular religion, overtime.

In a nutshell, this paper is about politics and strategic behavior in the large (democracyversus autocracy) within the context of the small (religious institutions).

The optimal organization of the family requires that relations are structured so that non-cooperative game playing is minimized and transaction costs are reduced. I show that therapeutic advice for behavior within the family is to create a functioning property rights system. Punishment is shown to be inferior to setting limits because the first encourages strategic game playing. I show why there is conflict between parent and their child even when the parent maximizes the child’s expected discounted utility. In addition, I provide a model of the intergenerational transfer of behavior.

Candidates may vary in quality, where quality is some characteristic orthogonal to policy. This "simple modification" has for the most part defied integration into the Downsian framework. Here we add the following complicating factors. We consider the possibility that there are uninformed voters who are ignorant of the candidates' relative quality. However, a pressure group with inside information regarding the quality of the candidates may endorse one of the candidates as the high-quality candidate. We assume that the uninformed voters behave rationally in the presence of this endorsement. We show that campaign endorsements by the pressure group are generally welfare improving even though the pressure group takes advantage of its private information.

We show that status-quo bias combined with downward-sloping demand implies addictive behavior. This result does not depend on transitivity, a complete ordering, or even the existence of a preference relation that rationalizes choices.

We construct game theoretic foundations for bargaining in the shadow of a trial. Plaintiff and defendant both have noisy signals of a common-value trial judgment and make simultaneous offers to settle. If the offers cross, they settle on the average offer; otherwise, both litigants incur an additional cost and the judgment is imposed at trial. We obtain an essentially unique NE and characterize its conditional trial probabilities and judgments. Some of the results are intuitive, e.g., an increase in trial cost (or a decrease in the range of possible outcomes) reduces the probability of a trial. Other results reverse findings from previous literature. For example, trials are possible even when the defendant’s signal indicates a higher potential judgment than the plaintiff’s signal, and when trial costs are low, the middling cases (rather than the extreme cases) are more likely to settle.

In 1999, Washington State decided to allocate supervision based on offenders' risk characteristics. These risk characteristics were measured by the actuarial instrument ``Level of Service Inventory - Revised.'' In analyzing the data, I discovered the unusual administration of the instrument by the local bureaucracy that resulted in many offenders being bumped to a higher supervision level. Using a regression discontinuity design, I uncover the mechanics of the bumping up process. After cleansing the instrument of the manipulation, I find that the manipulated instrument predicts time to recidivism better than the cleansed instrument. Moreover, using a regression discontinuity design I evaluate whether offenders of similar risk characteristics recidivate less if they receive a more intense supervision level. I find that offenders who received more supervision did not recidivate less. I also examined whether the authorities targeted certain groups of offenders more than others in the process of administering the instrument. Specifically, I tried to find out whether their behavior exhibits signs of what is known in the literature as ``preference or prejudice-based discrimination'' as opposed to ``statistical discrimination.'' I did not find conclusive evidence that certain groups were bumped up more than others. Moreover, even if we accept that certain groups are bumped up more, this can be justified by their higher recidivism rates, which amounts to ``statistical discrimination.'' Therefore, I found no evidence of unequal treatment in the administration of the risk assessment instrument. Finally, I found that I can significantly improve the predictive validity of the LSI-R instrument by having the items weighted. The results were found to be robust in a validation sample as well.