On Quitting Rights in Mechanism Design

By Olivier Compte and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Review, May 2007

An Ascending Auction for Interdependent Values: Uniqueness and Robustness to Strategic Uncertainty

By Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris

American Economic Review, May 2007

Some Evolutionary Economics of Family Partnerships

By Theodore C. Bergstrom

American Economic Review, May 2007

Habits, Peers, and Happiness: An Evolutionary Perspective

By Luis Rayo and Gary S. Becker

American Economic Review, May 2007

Integrated Insurance Design in the Presence of Multiple Medical Technologies

By Dana Goldman and Tomas J. Philipson

American Economic Review, May 2007

How Occupied France Financed Its Own Exploitation in World War II

By Filippo Occhino, Kim Oosterlinck, and Eugene N. White

American Economic Review, May 2007

Signaling Character in Electoral Competition

By Navin Kartik and R. Preston McAfee

American Economic Review, June 2007

We study a one-dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have "character" and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. Character is desira...

Harmonization and Side Payments in Political Cooperation

By Bård Harstad

American Economic Review, June 2007

For two districts or countries that try to internalize externalities, I analyze a bargaining game under private information. I derive conditions for when it is efficient with uniform policies across regions—with and without side payments— a...

Trust as a Signal of a Social Norm and the Hidden Costs of Incentive Schemes

By Dirk Sliwka

American Economic Review, June 2007

An explanation for motivation crowding-out phenomena is developed in a social preferences framework. Besides selfish and fair or altruistic types, a third type of agent is introduced. These "conformists" have social preferences if they believe that suffic...

Vertical Integration and Firm Boundaries: The Evidence

By Francine Lafontaine and Margaret Slade

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2007

Since Ronald H. Coase's (1937) seminal paper, a rich set of theories has been developed that deal with firm boundaries in vertical or input–output structures. In the last twenty-five years, empirical evidence that can shed light on those theories also...

Contracting with Repeated Moral Hazard and Private Evaluations

By William Fuchs

American Economic Review, September 2007

A repeated moral hazard setting in which the Principal privately observes the Agent's output is studied. The optimal contract for a finite horizon is characterized, and shown to require burning of resources. These are only burnt after the worst possible r...

Overconfidence, Insurance, and Paternalism

By Alvaro Sandroni and Francesco Squintani

American Economic Review, December 2007

It is well known that when agents are fully rational, compulsory public insurance may make all agents better off in the Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) model of insurance markets. We find that when sufficiently many agents underestimate their personal ri...

Efficiency and Information Aggregation in Auctions

By Wolfgang Pesendorfer and Jeroen M. Swinkels

American Economic Review, June 2000

The tension between allocative efficiency and information aggregation is explored in the context of an auction: k identical objects of unknown quality are auctioned off to n bidders whose tastes affect their valuation of an object of given quality. Bidder...

Taxes, Social Subsidies, and the Allocation of Work Time

By L. Rachel Ngai and Christopher A. Pissarides

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2011

We examine the allocation of hours of work across industrial sectors in OECD countries. We find large disparities across three sector groups, one that produces goods without home substitutes, and two others that have home substitutes but are treated diffe...

Derivative Assets Analysis

[Symposium: Arbitrage]

By Mark Rubinstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

Derivative assets analysis enjoys an unusual status; it is a recently developed, relatively complex tool of economic analysis, faithful to the core of economic theory, and widely used to make real-life decisions. This paper, discusses derivative assets ba...

Information and the Coase Theorem

By Joseph Farrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1987

Some economists think the Coase theorem implies a lot about the proper scope of government intervention in the economy and about the welfare consequences of laissez-faire. Others see it as a mere tautology: that if people negotiate efficiently then every ...

Value Maximization and the Acquisition Process

[Symposium: Takeovers]

By Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

Like the rest of us, corporate managers have many personal goals and ambitions, only one of which is to get rich. The way they try to run their companies reflects these personal goals. Shareholders, in contrast, deprived of the pleasures of running the co...

Corporate Takeovers: The Efficiency Arguments

[Symposium: Takeovers]

By F. M. Scherer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

In recent years, the tender offer takeover has been praised and damned with a ferocity suggesting that the survival of capitalism is at stake. The truth, as in most disputes with substantial metaphysical content, is more prosaic. Some takeovers enhance ec...

Anomalies: The Winner's Curse

By Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1988

Next time that you find yourself a little short of cash for lunch, try the following experiment in your class. Take a jar and fill it with coins, noting the total value of the coins. Now auction off the jar to your class (offering to pay the winning bidde...

Anomalies: Interindustry Wage Differentials

By Richard H. Thaler

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989

Firms advertise widely varying wages for jobs that appear to be very similar, such as secretary, data entry clerk, or "tele-marketing representative." Students who graduate from Cornell's MBA program often receive offers from several firms in the same cit...