Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets

[Symposium: Organ Transplants]

By Alvin E. Roth

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2007

This essay examines how repugnance sometimes constrains what transactions and markets we see. When my colleagues and I have helped design markets and allocation procedures, we have often found that distaste for certain kinds of transactions is a real cons...

Dispelling Some Misconceptions about Agricultural Trade Liberalization

By Stephen Tokarick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2008

There has been a great deal of public discussion over the impact that agricultural trade liberalization would likely have, especially on low-income countries. Unfortunately, the public discussion has been characterized by a number of misconceptions. This ...

Information Processing and Limited Liability

By Bartosz Mackowiak and Mirko Wiederholt

American Economic Review, May 2012

Decision-makers often face limited liability and thus know that their loss will be bounded. We study how limited liability affects the behavior of an agent who chooses how much information to acquire and process in order to take a good decision. We find t...

The Value of Information in Efficient Risk-Sharing Arrangements

By Edward E. Schlee

American Economic Review, June 2001

Suppose that agents share risks in competitive markets. We show that better information makes everyone worse off if the economy has a representative agent--that is, the economy's demand for state-contingent consumption equals the demand of a hypothetical ...

The Role of a Variable Input in the Relationship between Investment and Uncertainty

By Jaewoo Lee and Kwanho Shin

American Economic Review, June 2000

The Bidder's Curse: Reply

By Ulrike Malmendier

American Economic Review, April 2016

An important unresolved issue in the search literature is the question to what extent suboptimal search reflects "traditional search frictions," and to what extent it reflects behavioral biases. The distinction is important for assessing welfare, predi...

A Ricardo-Sraffa Paradigm Comparing Gains from Trade in Inputs and Finished Goods

By Paul A. Samuelson

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2001

Here is how the 1817 Ricardo comparative advantage trade benefit analysis has to be modified to take account of post-1960 Sraffian benefits from capital-using technologies. By bringing J. S. Mill's demand model up to date in terms of its implicit geometri...

Book Reviews

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

Capital-Markets Crises and Economic Collapse in Emerging Markets: An Informational-Frictions Approach

By Guillermo A. Calvo and Enrique G. Mendoza

American Economic Review, May 2000

Inferring Rationales from Choice: Identification for Rational Shortlist Methods

By Rohan Dutta and Sean Horan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

A wide variety of choice behavior inconsistent with preference maximization can be explained by Manzini and Mariotti's Rational Shortlist Methods. Choices are made by sequentially applying a pair of asymmetric binary relations (rationales) to eliminate in...

Do Women Supply More Public Goods Than Men? Preliminary Experimental Evidence from Matrilineal and Patriarchal Societies

By Steffen Andersen, Erwin Bulte, Uri Gneezy, and John A. List

American Economic Review, May 2008

Copyright Infringement in the Market for Digital Images

By Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer

American Economic Review, May 2016

Digital technologies for sharing creative goods create new opportunities for copyright infringement and challenge established enforcement methods. We establish several important facts about the nature of copyright infringement and efforts to settle past i...

Economic Development and the Regulation of Morally Contentious Activities

By Julio J. Elías, Nicola Lacetera, Mario Macis, and Paola Salardi

American Economic Review, May 2017

The regulation of many activities depends on whether societies consider them morally controversial or "repugnant." Not only have regulation and related ethical concerns changed over time, but there is also heterogeneity across countries at a given time. W...

Investment in General Human Capital and Turnover Intention

By Colleen Flaherty Manchester

American Economic Review, May 2010

Matching with Contracts: Comment

By Orhan Aygün and Tayfun Sönmez

American Economic Review, August 2013

The matching with contracts model (Hatfield and Milgrom 2005) is widely considered to be one of the most important advances of the last two decades in matching theory. One of their main messages is that the set of stable allocations is non-empty under a s...

Repression or Civil War?

By Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson

American Economic Review, May 2009

Shuttle Information

[Page]

View information about shuttle service at ASSA 2018

Appropriation, Property Rights Institutions, and International Trade

By Christodoulos Stefanadis

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2010

In producer-friendly economies—economies that are ruled by productive agents and have strong property rights institutions—international trade causes an institutional improvement and an aggregate shift of talent towards production, and away fro...

Insiders versus Outsiders in Monetary Policymaking

By Timothy Besley, Neil Meads, and Paolo Surico

American Economic Review, May 2008

Inferior Good and Giffen Behavior for Investing and Borrowing

By Felix Kubler, Larry Selden, and Xiao Wei

American Economic Review, April 2013

The standard assumption that asset demand increases in income and decreases in price has its origin in Arrow's classic model with one risky and one risk free asset, where both are held long, and preferences exhibit decreasing absolute and increasing relat...