This dissertation presents research on the game theory of political power, both between and within nations. It first revisits a classical distinction between three different types of power or influence: information, rewards and threats. By presenting a binary-action Principal-Agent problem which incorporates the essential ingredients of all three types of...
Contest theory is an area of game theory that studies environments in which agents make sunk investments in order to get a prize. These investments could be money, effort, time, etc. Contest theory is used to study a wide range of applications, like political contests, research and development, advertisement campaigns,...
This dissertation endogenizes information acquisition in two-player games across three different settings. The first chapter explores when moral hazard in a principal-agent contract can lead to pareto improvements when it is preceeded by information gathering. The second chapter studies how product differentiation affects the amount of market research done by...
Agents of online platforms often have to make purchase decisions in the face the uncertainty of the true value of an item. Observing the other agents’ actions and/or reviews is one common method to learn about an item. However such observational learning can lead to an information cascade, in which...