We model a two-candidate electoral competition in which there is uncertainty about a policy-relevant state of the world. The candidates receive private signals about the true state, which are imperfectly correlated. We study whether the candidates are able to credibly communicate their information to voters through their choice of policy platforms. Our results show that the fact that private information is dispersed between the candidates creates a strong incentive for them to bias their messages toward the electorate's prior. Information transmission becomes more di¢cult, the less correlated are the candidates' signals, the lower is the signals' quality, and the stronger is the electorate's prior. Indeed, for weak priors welfare decreases as the prior becomes stronger, and welfare always decreases as the signals become less correlated.JEL classi…cation: D72, D78, D82

No abstract

If Cournot oligopolists face uncertainty about the intercept of a linear demand function and if the realized market price must be non-negative, then expected demand becomes convex, which can create a multiplicity of equilibria. This note shows that if the distribution of the demand intercept has a monotone hazard rate and if another, rather weak, assumption is satisfied, then uniqueness of equilibrium is guaranteed.

No abstract

We develop a model in which two firms that have proposed to merge are privately informed about merger-specific efficiencies. This enables the firms to influence the merger control procedure by strategically revealing their information to an antitrust authority. Although the information improves upon the quality of the authority's decision, the influence activities may be detrimental to welfare if information processing/gathering is excessively costly. Whether this is the case depends on the merger control institution and, in particular, whether it involves an efficiency defense. We derive the optimal institution and provide conditions under which an efficiency defense is desirable. We also discuss the implications for antitrust policy and outline a three-step procedure that takes the influence activities into consideration. //[Doc: merger-19.tex]//