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

From Immediate Acceptance to Deferred Acceptance: Effects on School Admissions and Achievement in England

By Camille Terrier, Parag A. Pathak, and Kevin Ren

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2026

Countries and cities around the world increasingly rely on centralized systems for student placement. Two algorithms, deferred acceptance (DA) and immediate acceptance (IA), are widespread. We investigate the effects of the national ban of IA in England. ...

Sequential Learning under Informational Ambiguity

By Jaden Yang Chen

American Economic Review, January 2026

This paper investigates a sequential social learning problem in which individuals face ambiguity about others' signal structures and have max-min expected utility preferences, thereby exhibiting ambiguity aversion. Unlike previous findings, which suggest ...

On Dynamic Pricing

By Ilia Krasikov and Rohit Lamba

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

This paper builds a theory of dynamic pricing for the sale of timed goods. The main friction is private and evolving valuation of the buyer prior to the date of consumption, which follows a Poisson process. A combination of membership fees and continuousl...

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

How to Allocate Money?

By Piotr Dworczak

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

I study a simple equity-efficiency problem: A designer allocates a fixed amount of money to a population of agents differing in privately observed marginal values for money. She can only screen by imposing an "ordeal"—that is, by allocating more money t...

Raising the Stakes: Physician Facility Investments and Provider Agency

By Elizabeth L. Munnich, Michael R. Richards, Christopher M. Whaley, and Xiaoxi Zhao

American Economic Review, February 2026

Principal-agent problems often extend beyond what can be directly addressed through conventional incentive arrangements. We examine a context where physicians are likely under-incentivized to minimize total medical costs until their private financial inte...

Competition under Incomplete Contracts and the Design of Procurement Policies

By Rodrigo Carril, Andres Gonzalez-Lira, and Michael S. Walker

American Economic Review, February 2026

We study the effects of intensifying competition for contracts in the context of US Defense procurement. Leveraging a discontinuous regulation that mandates agencies to publicize certain contract opportunities, we document that expanding the set of bidder...

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