School Vouchers: A Critical View

[Symposium: School Vouchers]

By Helen F. Ladd

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

This paper marshals available evidence from both the U.S. and other countries on the effects of private schools, peer effects, and competition to demonstrate that that any gains in overall student achievement from a large scale voucher program are at best...

Trends in Aggregate Concentration in the United States

By Lawrence J. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

I assemble two rarely used data sets to measure aggregate concentration in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the merger waves of those decades, aggregate concentration declined in the 1980s and the early 1990s, but rose modestly in the late 1990s. ...

Hybrid All-Pay and Winner-Pay Contests

By Johan N. M. Lagerlöf

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2020

In many contests in economic and political life, both all-pay and winner-pay expenditures matter for winning. This paper studies such hybrid contests under symmetry and asymmetry. The symmetric model assumes very little structure but yields a simple close...

A Few Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: An Anti-folk Theorem for Anonymous Repeated Games with Incomplete Information

By Takuo Sugaya and Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, December 2020

We study anonymous repeated games where players may be "commitment types" who always take the same action. We establish a stark anti-folk theorem: if the distribution of the number of commitment types satisfies a smoothness condition and the game has a "p...

Strategic Experimentation with Congestion

By Caroline D. Thomas

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2021

This paper considers a two-player game of strategic experimentation with competition. Each agent faces a two-armed bandit problem where she continually chooses between her private, risky arm and a common, safe arm. Each agent has exclusive access to her p...

Information Design and Strategic Communication

By Daniel Krähmer

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2021

I study sender-receiver games where the receiver can disclose information to the sender by designing an information structure. I show that by secretly randomizing over information structures, the receiver can virtually attain her complete information payo...

Notes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004

Historical Presidential Betting Markets

[Symposium: Event Markets]

By Paul W. Rhode and Koleman S. Strumpf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004

This paper analyzes the large and often well-organized markets for betting on U.S. presidential elections that operated between 1868 and 1940. Four main points are addressed. First, we show that the market did a remarkable job forecasting elections in an ...

Common-Value Public Goods and Informational Social Dilemmas

By Caleb A. Cox and Brock Stoddard

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

We experimentally examine private information and communication in a public goods environment with uncertain returns. We consider a common-value public goods game in which the return to contribution is either high or low. Before contributing, three player...

Development, Growth and Policy Reform in the Middle East and North Africa since 1950

[Symposium: Middle East]

By Tarik M. Yousef

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

The September 11 terrorist attacks ignited global interest in the Middle East. Observers in the region and abroad were quick to highlight the development "deficits" in Middle Eastern countries which have been linked to everything from structural economic ...

Global Public Goods: A Survey

By Wolfgang Buchholz and Todd Sandler

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2021

This survey investigates the increasing importance of global public goods (GPGs) in today's interdependent world, driven by ever-growing, cross-border externalities and public good spillovers. Novel technologies, enhanced globalization, and population i...

A Normal Country: Russia After Communism

[Symposium: The Economy of Russia]

By Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

During the 1990s, Russia underwent an extraordinary transformation from a communist dictatorship to a multi-party democracy, from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, and from a belligerent adversary of the West to a cooperative partner. Yet a...

M Equilibrium: A Theory of Beliefs and Choices in Games

By Jacob K. Goeree and Philippos Louis

American Economic Review, December 2021

We introduce a set-valued solution concept, M equilibrium, to capture empirical regularities from over half a century of game theory experiments. We show M equilibrium serves as a meta theory for various models that hitherto were considered unrelated. M e...

The Original Management Incentive Schemes

[Symposium: Stock Options Now and Then]

By Richard T. Holden

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

During the 1990s, the structure of pay for top corporate executives shifted markedly as the use of stock options greatly expanded. By the early 2000s, as the dot-com boom ended and the Nasdaq stock index melted down, these modern executive incentive schem...

Stochastic Equilibria: Noise in Actions or Beliefs?

By Evan Friedman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2022

We introduce noisy belief equilibrium (NBE) for normal-form games in which players best respond to noisy belief realizations. Axioms restrict belief distributions to be unbiased with respect to and responsive to changes in the opponents' behavior. The axi...

Negotiations with Limited Specifiability

By Satoshi Fukuda and Yuichiro Kamada

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2022

We study negotiations with limited specifiability⁠—each party may not be able to fully specify a negotiation outcome. We construct a class of negotiation protocols to conduct comparative statics on specifiability as well as move structures. We find th...

A Review of Robert Sugden's Community of Advantage

By Patrick Harless and Romans Pancs

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

In his book, The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist's Defence of the Market, Robert Sugden says that people should be left alone to do what they want. We interpret his reasons for saying so and try to unify them. The unification uses...

Missing in Action: Teacher and Health Worker Absence in Developing Countries

[Symposium: Public Sector Absenteeism]

By Nazmul Chaudhury, Jeffrey Hammer, Michael Kremer, Karthik Muralidharan, and F. Halsey Rogers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

In this paper, we report results from surveys in which enumerators made unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the f...

An Index of Competitiveness and Cooperativeness for Normal-Form Games

By Thomas Demuynck, Christian Seel, and Giang Tran

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

We develop an index of competitiveness and cooperativeness that is based on the primitives of a normal-form game, i.e., players, strategies and payoffs. The index relies on the unique decomposition of a given game into a zero-sum game and a common interes...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2003