Optimal Contracting with Subjective Evaluation

By W. Bentley MacLeod

American Economic Review, March 2003

This paper extends the standard principal-agent model to allow for subjective evaluation. The optimal contract results in more compressed pay relative to the case with verifiable performance measures. Moreover, discrimination against an individual implies...

Allocation Mechanisms with Mixture-Averse Preferences

By David Dillenberger and Uzi Segal

American Economic Review, December 2025

Consider an economy with equal amounts of N types of goods, to be allocated to agents with strict quasi-convex preferences over lotteries. We show that ex ante, all Pareto-efficient allocations give almost all agents lotteries over at most two outcomes. O...

Corporate Lobbying and Commitment Failure in Capital Taxation

By Nicolas Marceau and Michael Smart

American Economic Review, March 2003

Access to Food and the Biological Standard of Living: Perspectives on the Nutritional Status of Native Americans

By John Komlos

American Economic Review, March 2003

The Mismatch Between Life Insurance Holdings and Financial Vulnerabilities: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

By B. Douglas Bernheim, Lorenzo Forni, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff

American Economic Review, March 2003

Organizational Design and Technology Choice under Intrafirm Bargaining: Reply

By Lars A. Stole and Jeffrey Zwiebel

American Economic Review, March 2003

Libertarian Paternalism

By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

American Economic Review, May 2003

Studying Optimal Paternalism, Illustrated by a Model of Sin Taxes

By Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, May 2003

Decision Making with Naive Advice

By Andrew Schotter

American Economic Review, May 2003

A New Approach to Risk-Spreading via Coverage-Expansion Subsidies

By John Holahan, Len M. Nichols, Linda J. Blumberg, and Yu-Chu Shen

American Economic Review, May 2003

The persistently large number of uninsured, roughly 40 million per year since 1993, continues to elicit bipartisan policy interest. Coverage-expansion proposals without mandates, by far the most common since the defeat of the Clinton plan, must address ri...

Thanatology and Economics: The Behavioral Economics of Death

By Joel Slemrod

American Economic Review, May 2003

Average Debt and Equity Returns: Puzzling?

By Ellen R. McGrattan and Edward C. Prescott

American Economic Review, May 2003

The Impact of Bankruptcy on Airline Service Levels

By Severin Borenstein and Nancy L. Rose

American Economic Review, May 2003

The Effects of Environmental Regulation on Technology Diffusion: The Case of Chlorine Manufacturing

By Lori D. Snyder, Nolan H. Miller, and Robert N. Stavins

American Economic Review, May 2003

Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession

American Economic Review, May 2003

Optimal Pricing Mechanisms with Unknown Demand

By Ilya Segal

American Economic Review, June 2003

The standard profit-maximizing multiunit auction intersects the submitted demand curve with a preset reservation supply curve, which is determined using the distribution from which the buyers' valuations are drawn. However, when this distribution is unkno...

What Do Bargainers' Preferences Look Like? Experiments with a Convex Ultimatum Game

By James Andreoni, Marco Castillo, and Ragan Petrie

American Economic Review, June 2003

The ultimatum game, by its all-or-nothing nature, makes it difficult to discern what kind of preferences may be generating choices. We explore a game that convexifies the decisions, allowing us a better look at the indifference curves of bargainers while ...

A Theory of Defensive Skill-Biased Innovation and Globalization

By Mathias Thoenig and Thierry Verdier

American Economic Review, June 2003

This paper considers a dynamic model of innovations in which firms can endogenously bias the direction of technological change. Both in a North-North and North-South context, we show that, when globalization triggers an increased threat of technological l...

School Choice: A Mechanism Design Approach

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Tayfun Sönmez

American Economic Review, June 2003

A central issue in school choice is the design of a student assignment mechanism. Education literature provides guidance for the design of such mechanisms but does not offer specific mechanisms. The flaws in the existing school choice plans result in appe...

Do Government Grants to Private Charities Crowd Out Giving or Fund-raising?

By James Andreoni and A. Abigail Payne

American Economic Review, June 2003

Economists have long observed that crowding out of government grants to private charities is incomplete. The accepted belief is that givers treat the grants as imperfect substitutes for private giving. We theoretically and empirically investigate a second...