Simultaneous Model of Innovation, Secrecy, and Patent Policy

By Klaus Kultti, Tuomas Takalo, and Juuso Toikka

American Economic Review, May 2006

White-Collar Crime Writ Small: A Case Study of Bagels, Donuts, and the Honor System

By Steven D. Levitt

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Return to Capital in Ghana

By Christopher Udry and Santosh Anagol

American Economic Review, May 2006

Matching and Price Competition

By Jeremy Bulow and Jonathan Levin

American Economic Review, June 2006

We develop a model in which firms set impersonal salary levels before matching with workers. Wages fall relative to any competitive equilibrium while profits rise almost as much, implying little inefficiency. Furthermore, the best firms gain the most f...

Investment Behavior, Observable Expectations, and Internal Funds

By Jason G. Cummins, Kevin A. Hassett, and Stephen D. Oliner

American Economic Review, June 2006

We use earnings forecasts from securities analysts to construct a new measure of the neoclassical fundamentals that drive investment spending. We find that investment responds significantly to our new measure of fundamentals but is insensitive to cash fl...

The Economics of HIV/AIDS in Low-Income Countries: The Case for Prevention

[Symposium: Disease and Development]

By David Canning

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

There are two approaches to reducing the burden of sickness and death associated with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which leads to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS): treatment and prevention. Despite large international aid flows for HIV...

The Speed of Learning in Noisy Games: Partial Reinforcement and the Sustainability of Cooperation

By Yoella Bereby-Meyer and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Review, September 2006

In an experiment, players' ability to learn to cooperate in the repeated prisoner's dilemma was substantially diminished when the payoffs were noisy, even though players could monitor one another’s past actions perfectly. In contrast, in one-time play...

Cognition and Behavior in Two-Person Guessing Games: An Experimental Study

By Miguel A. Costa-Gomes and Vincent P. Crawford

American Economic Review, December 2006

This paper reports an experiment that elicits subjects’ initial responses to 16 dominance-solvable two-person guessing games. The structure is publicly announced except for varying payoff parameters, to which subjects are given free access. Varying th...

Minimax Play at Wimbledon: Comment

By Shih-Hsun Hsu, Chen-Ying Huang, and Cheng-Tao Tang

American Economic Review, March 2007

Market Maker Inventories and Stock Prices

By Terrence Hendershott and Mark S. Seasholes

American Economic Review, May 2007

Fatal Attraction: Salience, Naïveté, and Sophistication in Experimental "Hide-and-Seek" Games

By Vincent P. Crawford and Nagore Iriberri

American Economic Review, December 2007

"Hide-and-seek" games are zero-sum two-person games in which one player wins by matching the other's decision and the other wins by mismatching. Although such games are often played on cultural or geographic "landscapes" that frame decisions nonneutral...

Group Reputations, Stereotypes, and Cooperation in a Repeated Labor Market

By Paul J. Healy

American Economic Review, December 2007

Reputation effects and other-regarding preferences have both been used to predict cooperative outcomes in markets with inefficient equilibria. Existing reputation-building models require either infinite time horizons or publicly observed identities, bu...

Individual Preferences for Giving

By Raymond Fisman, Shachar Kariv, and Daniel Markovits

American Economic Review, December 2007

We utilize graphical representations of Dictator Games which generate rich individual- level data. Our baseline experiment employs budget sets over feasible payoff- pairs. We test these data for consistency with utility maximization, and we recover th...

Rational Expectations in Games

By Robert J. Aumann and Jacques H. Dreze

American Economic Review, March 2008

A player i's actions in a game are determined by her beliefs about other players; these depend on the game's real-life context, not only its formal description. Define a game situation as a game together with such beliefs; call the beliefs— and i...

On the Empirical Content of Quantal Response Equilibrium

By Philip A. Haile, Ali Hortaçsu, and Grigory Kosenok

American Economic Review, March 2008

The quantal response equilibrium (QRE) notion of Richard D. McKelvey and Thomas R. Palfrey (1995) has recently attracted considerable attention, due in part to its widely documented ability to rationalize observed behavior in games played by experiment...

Betrayal Aversion: Evidence from Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States

By Iris Bohnet, Fiona Greig, Benedikt Herrmann, and Richard Zeckhauser

American Economic Review, March 2008

Due to betrayal aversion, people take risks less willingly when the agent of uncertainty is another person rather than nature. Individuals in six countries (Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States) confronted a binary-choice tru...

Macroeconomic Performance and Collective Bargaining: An International Perspective

By Robert J. Flanagan

Journal of Economic Literature, September 1999

This paper critically reviews the research on how collective bargaining systems influence macroeconomic performance in industrialized countries. The review considers effects of bargaining level, coordination, and corporatist institutional arrangements. Ke...

An Essay on Fiscal Federalism

By Wallace E. Oates

Journal of Economic Literature, September 1999

This paper is a selective survey of fiscal federalism. It begins with a brief review and some reflections on the traditional theory of fiscal federalism: the assignment of functions to levels of government, the welfare gains from fiscal decentralization, ...

Intergenerational Transfers and Savings

[Symposium: Explaining Savings]

By Laurence J. Kotlikoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

What is the main explanation for savings? Is it primarily accumulation for retirement as claimed by Albert Ando, Richard Brumberg, and Franco Modigliani in their celebrated Life Cycle Model of Savings? Is it primarily intentional accumulation for intergen...

Symposium on Public and Private Unionization

[Symposium: Explaining Savings]

By Edward P. Lazear

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1988

Understanding the source of the decline of private sector unions and concomitant rise of public sectors unions is essential. Without that knowledge, the welfare effects of the changes cannot be ascertained. The two essays that follow take us a long way do...