Incentives and political contributions

Political Incentives to Privatize

The scope of the public sector (i.e. what activities are undertaken by public rather than private entities) is a decision made by politicians. While there are economic costs and benefits to privatization, there is also a political benefit to incumbents: By privatizing today, politicians transfer future revenues (when they might not be in office) to the present. This political benefit leads to o...

Political Contributions , Foreign Direct Investment and Mergers

We examine the effects of mergers and internal groups (lobbies) in shaping national policies towards foreign direct investment. Lobbying is modeled following the political contributions approach. In this work we develop a partial equilibrium model of an oligopolistic industry in which a number of domestic and foreign firms compete in the market for a homogeneous good in a host country. It is as...

Electoral Incentives, Political Risk-Taking and Policy Reform

We analyze the risk-taking behavior of political candidates who are uncertain about the values voters assign to various policy platforms. We show that the majoritarian and proportional electoral systems lead to different outcomes. The proportional system penalizes risky platforms more than the winner-take-all system. Since candidates choose “safer” platforms, in the proportional system voters f...

Electoral Incentives and Political Parties in the Brazilian Budget Policy

Encouraging Contributions to Online Communities with Personalization and Incentives

Increasingly, online systems depend on user contributions such as posts, ratings, tags, and comments. Many of these systems wish to encourage broader participation or the contribution of higher quality content. In this doctoral consortium paper, I present past work and propose future work on understanding user motivations to contribute online and on the use of personalization technology and inc...