Paul Pecorino

University of Alabama | UA · Department of Economics, Finance and Legal Studies

Matching is a commonly used fund‐raising tactic, whereby small donors have their donation to a charity matched via a fund established by large donors. I developed a model in which a single large donor decides whether to establish a matching fund or contribute to the public good via the voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM). The credibility of the...

The existence of lawsuits providing plaintiffs a negative expected value (NEV) at trial has important theoretical implications for signaling models of litigation. The signaling equilibrium possible when there are no NEV suits breaks down because plaintiffs with NEV suits do not have a credible threat to proceed to trial, which undermines the abilit...

A government sets the level of taxation to provide a public good valued by consumers. There are two groups of consumers, the rich and the poor. The government has redistributive preferences, but is initially constrained to use lump‐sum taxation. This potentially leads the government to provide a very low level of the public good out of concern for...

This article investigates the implications of Baumol’s cost disease for a publicly provided good in the presence of distortionary taxation. A model is presented in which the publicly provided good experiences low labour productivity growth relative to the private good. The public sector will grow monotonically with the productivity differential bet...

We examine the behavior of the incarceration rate and the racial disparity in imprisonment for black women over the period 1978–2016 and compare this to the results for black men. At the beginning of our sample, the racial disparity is high and of similar magnitude for both groups. Black women and black men both experience a large run-up in incarce...

The existence of lawsuits providing plaintiffs a negative expected value (NEV) at trial has important theoretical implications for signaling models of litigation. The signaling equilibrium possible absent NEV suits breaks down with NEV suits because plaintiffs do not have a credible threat to proceed to trial undermining the ability to signal type....

We develop screening models of final offer arbitration (FOA) in which the uninformed party makes a demand to the informed party. We consider models in which settlement occurs before and after the submission of binding offers, and in each we analyze costly discovery. Our results are compared to conventional arbitration (CA) which may be viewed as a...

We develop a signaling model of final offer arbitration (FOA) in which the informed party makes the final settlement demand to the uninformed party. In FOA, each party submits a proposal to an arbitrator and if no agreement is reached, the arbitrator must select one of the two submitted proposals. We analyze a “before” model of FOA in which all set...

In Final Offer Arbitration, both parties submit a proposal to an arbitrator. In the event the parties cannot reach a negotiated settlement, the arbitrator chooses the submitted proposal that is closest to her preferred settlement. In such a model, asymmetric information can lead to costly bargaining failure. Voluntary disclosure of private informat...

Esteban and Ray develop a model with an increasing marginal cost of contribution, and overturn the Olson hypothesis that large groups cannot provide themselves with a rival public good. In contrast, Pecorino and Temimi incorporate fixed but avoidable participation costs into this framework, and conclude that public good provision must fall to zero...

Thomas Schelling (Arms and influence, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1966) cites bridge burning as a method of commitment. While such a commitment can increase the chances of success in a conflict, it generally will lower one’s payoff if the conflict is lost. I use a contest framework and establish conditions under which such commitment can rais...

Two standard results in the litigation literature are that an informed party will not make a costly voluntary disclosure in a screening game and that the uninformed party will not engage in costly discovery in the signaling game. Both of these results rely on the assumption that the party making the offer can extract the entire surplus of settlemen...

Objectives We analyze the contribution of changes in the black–white racial disparity in imprisonment to changes in the black incarceration rate. We also describe the behavior of the racial disparity across states and across time. Methods We use state level incarceration data for non-Hispanic black and white males to perform a decomposition of the...

We conduct an experimental analysis of discovery in both the signaling and screening games, where in both games an uninformed defendant may engage in costly discovery. Under the theory, the defendant should invoke the costly discovery procedure in the screening game, but not in the signaling game. In the later part of the screening game, discovery...

We conduct an experimental analysis of pretrial bargaining, while allowing for the costly disclosure of private information in a signaling game. Under the theory, 100 % of plaintiffs with a weak case are predicted to remain silent, while 100 % of the plaintiffs with a strong case are predicted to voluntarily disclose their type. We find that 75 % o...

We present an experimental analysis of the signaling and screening models of litigation. In both models, bargaining failure is driven by asymmetric information. The difference between the models lies in the bargaining structure: In the signaling game, the informed party makes the final offer, while in the screening game the uninformed party makes t...

I develop models in which a minimum winning coalition decides on the level of government spending, where the Coase theorem holds amongst members of the winning coalition. An increase in the supermajority requirement has potentially conflicting effects on spending. A higher requirement increases the tax price internalized by the minimum winning coal...

Research on the distribution of federal expenditures has provided mixed evidence showing that states with more legislators who belong to the president’s party and states with more legislators in the chamber majority tend to receive a larger allocation of federal funds. We add to this research by considering how political polarization and political...

We consider a model of litigation in which some defendants have insufficient assets to pay a judgment at trial. Because the defendant’s assets are not observable, this serves as a source of asymmetric information which leads to trials in the equilibrium of the model. Unlike many other types of informational asymmetry, the defendant’s assets are not...

I develop a model in which a firm can choose to donate a portion of its profits to the provision of a public good. Consumers value this public good and are willing to pay a price premium to a firm which makes such a donation. When this price premium is sufficiently large, the firm can raise its net profits by pledging a portion of those profits to...

We develop a model of pretrial bargaining under asymmetric information where both the plaintiff and the defendant’s cost of proceeding to trial is an increasing function of the judgment at trial. This contrasts with the standard assumption that costs at trial are a constant. As a result of this assumption, fee shifting can affect the incidence of t...

How does an increase in group size affect individual welfare in the presence of Olson’s group size paradox? Under the standard approaches to modeling the group size paradox, individual welfare declines as the size of the group expands. However, this may not be true if we apply the group size paradox to politics. In particular, if a smaller group at...

How does an increase in group size affect individual welfare in the presence of Olson’s group size paradox? Under the standard approaches to modeling the group size paradox, individual welfare declines as the size of the group expands. However, this may not be true if we apply the group size paradox to politics. In particular, if a smaller group at...

We conduct an experimental analysis of pretrial bargaining, while allowing for the costly disclosure of private information in a signaling game. Under the theory, 100% of plaintiffs with a weak case are predicted to remain silent, while 100% of the plaintiffs with a strong case are predicted to voluntarily disclose their type. In the second half of...

We conduct an experimental analysis of discovery in both the signaling and screening games, where in both games an uninformed defendant may engage in costly discovery. Under the theory, the defendant should invoke the costly discovery procedure in the screening game, but not in the signaling game. In the later part of the screening game, discovery...

A standard result in the litigation literature is that the informed party will not make a costly voluntary disclosure in a screening game. We develop a screening game in which an uninformed plaintiff makes an offer to an informed defendant. Under the American rule for the allocation of trial costs, we find that the defendant will make a costly volu...

In the 50 years since its publication, Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action has had an enormous impact on the academic literature in both economics and political science. In this review essay, I discuss Olson’s work in light of the ensuing research, particularly developments in the theoretical literature. Much of the discussion focuses on the...

In the 50 years since its publication, Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action has had an enormous impact on the academic literature in both economics and political science. In this review essay, I discuss Olson’s work in light of the ensuing research, particularly developments in the theoretical literature. Much of the discussion focuses on the...

Research on the distribution of federal expenditures has provided mixed evidence showing that states with more legislators who belong to the president's party and states with more legislators in the chamber majority tend to receive a larger allocation of federal funds. We add to this research by considering how political polarization and political...

In a model of pretrial bargaining under asymmetric information, we analyze the defendant’s threat to proceed to trial in the face of a rejected offer. The incidence of trial is lower when the defendant’s constraint is binding compared with the unconstrained case. The signs of some of the comparative statics of the model are a function of whether or...

We conduct an experimental analysis of pretrial bargaining, while allowing for the costly voluntary disclosure of private information in a screening game. In this game, the theoretical prediction is that costly voluntary disclosures will not occur. This hinges on the prediction that the person making the offer will extract all the joint surplus of...

We develop a model of pretrial bargaining under asymmetric information where both the plaintiff and the defendant’s cost of proceeding to trial is an increasing function of the judgment at trial. This contrasts with the standard assumption that costs at trial are a constant. As a result of this assumption, fee shifting can affect the incidence of t...

We develop a model with asymmetric information, where the uninformed party makes the offer. When parties proceed to trial, their endogenous expenditures partially determine the outcome. The endogenous spending at trial can either strengthen or weaken the bargaining position of the uninformed party with the player types who settle. When the bargaini...

I develop a model in which a firm can choose to donate a portion of its profits to the provision of a public good. Consumers value this public good and are willing to pay a price premium to a firm which makes such a donation. Under certain circumstances, this price premium is sufficiently large that the firm can raise its net profits by pledging a...

We present an experimental analysis of the signaling and screening models of litigation. In both models, bargaining failure is driven by asymmetric information. The difference between the models lies in the bargaining structure: In the signaling game, the informed party makes the final offer, while in the screening game the uninformed party makes t...

We conduct a bargaining experiment where the dispute resolution mechanism can be interpreted as a civil trial or conventional arbitration. The game involves a take-it-or-leave-it bargaining structure, and therefore contains an embedded ultimatum game. The sum of the dispute costs is constant, and in the baseline these costs are symmetric. A within-...

Asymmetric information is a leading explanation for settlement failure that results in a costly trial. Typically, the information in question is assumed to have bilateral payoff relevance, meaning it affects the expected payoffs of both the plaintiff and defendant. When there is bilateral payoff relevance, trials may be predicted, regardless of whe...

Recently, a great deal of controversy has been generated from the salaries earned by head coaches in the NCAA. Although many figures in the world of sports earn high salaries, one important difference in the case of the NCAA is that the players do not get paid. We develop a model that shows that a cartel agreement to not pay the players raises the...

We develop a model with asymmetric information, where the uninformed party makes the offer. When parties proceed to trial, their endogenous expenditures partially determine the outcome. The endogenous spending at trial can either strengthen or weaken the bargaining position of the uninformed party with the player types who settle. When the bargaini...

I develop a model in which the voluntary contributions mechanism for the provision of public goods totally breaks down in a large society. A by-product firm sells a private good and uses its profits to provide a public good. By-product firms compete with for-profit firms in a monopolistically competitive industry. If the number of by-product firms...

A by-product firm uses the profits from the sale of a private good to finance provision of a public good. If the public good exhibits any degree of rivalry, an increase in population will lead to a reduction in the provision of the public good, when the number of by-product firms is constant. An increase in the number of by-product firms raises pro...

Richard Epstein has argued that, in a fairly broad range of circumstances, governments should pay compensation for regulatory actions which impose costs on a subset of society. I develop a model in which there are two groups, one of whom benefits from a regulation, and one of whom bears the costs. A potentially biased government sets the level of t...

As a result of Title IX, there has been a large increase in participation of women in college sports, while men’s participation has remained roughly constant. We model the resource allocation decision across sports before and after Title IX was imposed. If the number of sports is held constant, the model predicts an increase in resources devoted to...

I develop a model in which there are two groups in society, one of which bears all the costs of a regulation that provides (potentially unequal) benefits to both groups. Absent compensation, a biased government will not choose the efficient level of regulation. If taxes are nondistorting, a compensation rule can be designed to achieve the first bes...

It is well established that the provision of a pure public good is increasing in group size if the good is normal. What I show is that if the good exhibits even a small degree of rivalry, then the individual level of consumption of the public good falls to zero in a large group. Thus, a strong version of Olson’s large group hypothesis applies to a...

In the standard model, provision of a pure public good is increasing in group size if it is a normal good. I develop a model of public good provision in which private goods are supplied in a monopolistically competitive market. In this model, group size corresponds to population. I find that increases in population lead to reduced public good provi...

Under the standard summation technology, pure public goods can be provided via the direct contributions mechanism, even in an arbitrarily large group. However, if the public good exhibits any degree of rivalry, individual consumption of the public good will fall to zero as group size grows large. Thus, the direct contributions mechanism is not robu...

Rodrik (1995) notes that trade regimes tend to be biased towards import protection, while the standard political economy models either yield no prediction on the bias of the trade regime or predict, counterfactually, a bias towards the export sector. This constitutes an important shortcoming in the political economy of trade literature. In this pap...

"Recently, a great deal of controversy has been generated from the salaries earned by head coaches in the NCAA. Although many figures in the world of sports earn high salaries, one important difference in the case of the NCAA is that the players do not get paid. We develop a model that shows that a cartel agreement to not pay the players raises the...

Esteban and Ray (2001) model an increasing marginal cost of effort in providing a public good. If the marginal cost of contribution function has an elasticity greater than 1, then the level of provision is increasing in group size, regardless of the degree of rivalry of the public good. We modify their model to a standard public goods setting, wher...

The high cost of disputes creates an incentive for parties to disputes to settle. In civil litigation and arbitration, settlement failure may arise from asymmetric information or optimism. Devices to induce settlement include voluntary disclosure and mandatory discovery. The effects of these are considered, as are the English rule (whereby the lose...

We extend the 1986 signaling model of Reinganum and Wilde by allowing for the possibility of negative expected value (NEV) suits. If filing costs are zero, the equilibrium consistent with the D1 refinement implies that settlement offers face a rejection rate of 100%. If filing costs are positive, an equilibrium with settlement can be restored. In t...

With the election of 1994, the Republican party gained control of both houses of the U.S. Congress for the first time since 1954. In this paper, we analyze whether this change in party control had significant effects on the determinants of federal spending at the state level. To perform this analysis, we utilize panel data on federal spending, at t...

It is well established that the provision of a pure public good is increasing in group size if the good is normal. What I show is that if the good exhibits even a small degree of rivalry, then the individual level of consumption of the public good falls to 0 in a large group. Thus, a strong version of the Olson hypothesis applies to anything other...

Olson (1965) argues that some large groups can overcome the free-rider problem through by-product lobbying. The by-product firm sells a private good to potential members of the interest group and finances lobbying with its profits. George Stigler (1974) argued that by-product lobbying firms cannot survive competition with for-profit firms, since th...

Using data from Backus and Kehoe (1992) we establish the existence of a positive relationship between the price-output correlation and the variance of output. This is consistent with the idea that reductions in the magnitude of aggregate demand shocks have been the dominant cause of changes in the price-output correlation across countries and acros...

We analyze the effect of group size on public good provision under the Morgan (2000) lottery mechanism. For a pure public good, the lottery performs quite well as public good provision is found to increase in group size, even when the lottery prize is held constant. By contrast, for fully rival public goods, per capita provision is found to decreas...

Pecorino (1998) models tariff lobbying in a repeated game and finds that cooperation can be maintained in a large group, even though tariff lobbying provides a rival public good to interest group members. We add small fixed costs of participation to this model and find that cooperation must break down in large groups. By contrast, if a fully rival...

The author argues that the college textbook market provides a clear example of monopoly seeking as described by Tullock (1967, 1980). This behavior is also known as rent seeking. Because this market is important to students, this example of rent seeking will be of particular interest to them.

In a standard rent-seeking contest, players optimally employ resources in an attempt to obtain the rent. Typically, it is assumed that these resources may be hired at any desired level at some exogenous per-unit cost. In practice, these resources often consist of scarce, talented individuals. We model a rent-seeking contest with scarce talent and f...

It is commonly believed that a monetary policy that targets the price level reduces the long‐term variability of the price level, but only at the cost of increased variability of both inflation and output. We develop a model in which the one‐step‐ahead variance of output and the price level are lower under price‐level targeting than under inflation...

It has been shown that states with higher per capita senate representation have higher federal spending per capita (Atlas, C. M., Gilligan, T. A., Hendershott, R. J. and Zupan, M. A. (1995). American Economic Review 85: 624–629). With a more recent data sample, more highly disaggregated data and a different set of political control variables, we ar...

It is generally accepted that US business expansions have been longer and contractions shorter since the end of World War II. Previous tests of this proposition uniformly assume that the change in business-cycle behavior occurred after the war. This paper presents evidence that it is more likely that business-cycle expansions became longer beginnin...

It is commonly believed that a monetary policy that targets the price level reduces the long-term variability of the price level, but only at the cost of increased variability of both inflation and output. We develop a model in which the one-step-ahead variance of output and the price level are lower under price-level targeting than under inflation...

We analyze contingency fees in the Reinganum and Wilde (1986) signaling model of litigation. The effect of contingency fees on settlement depends on the details of the contingency fee contract and the nature of the informational asymmetry assumed in the model. Introducing bifurcated fee contracts where the contingency percentage is higher at trial...

We consider models of pretrial negotiations where both costly voluntary disclosure and costly mandatory discovery are possible. When the uninformed party makes the final offer (the screening game), mandatory discovery will be utilized if it is not very costly, but voluntary disclosure will not occur in the absence of a discovery procedure. When the...

We analyze contingency fees in the Reinganum and Wilde (1986) signaling model of litigation. The effect of contingency fees on settlement depends on the details of the contingency fee contract and the nature of the informational asymmetry assumed in the model. Introducing bifurcated fee contracts where the contingency percentage is higher at trial...

We analyze contingency fees in the Reinganum and Wilde (1986) signaling model of litigation. The effect of contingency fees on settlement depends on the details of the contingency fee contract and the nature of the informational asymmetry assumed in the model. Introducing bifurcated fee contracts where the contingency percentage is higher at trial...

We embed an ultimatum game in a stylized legal bargaining framework. This changes the framing of the standard ultimatum game in several ways but also moves the bargaining closer to what is found in some naturally occurring settings. In this context, the ultimatum game is played over the joint surplus, which is achieved from settlement rather than a...

Asymmetric information on preferences is a potentially important explanation of bargaining failure. Preferences are not directly observable and information about preferences may be difficult to credibly establish to a bargaining partner. Unobserved preferences which may be relevant for pretrial bargaining include the degree of risk aversion, the de...

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Recent work by Pecorino (1998, 1999) and Esteban and Ray (2001) has called into question one of the central propositions of Olson (1965) relating public good provision to group size. Pecorino addresses this issue in a repeated game context, while Esteban and Ray introduce a technology under which there is an increasing marginal cost of effort in pr...

Final-offer arbitration in Major League Baseball provides an ideal setting for examining the empirical regularities that are associated with bargaining failure, since final offers, salaries, and player statistics, which provide the fundamental facts for the case, are all readily available. Using data for players eligible for arbitration for 1990-93...

We investigate policy reform in a model with both lobbying, which involves a free-rider problem, and ordinary rent seeking, which does not. These activities involve similar skills, so a reform which reduces rents shifts labor into lobbying. Also, because of the free-rider problem, the marginal return to the industry from lobbying may greatly exceed...