Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes...

This paper studies quality choice in a model where consumers expect firms (or brands) to act altruistically. Under plausible assumptions regarding this altruism and the reaction of consumers to firms that demonstrate insufficient altruism, existing brands can face a larger demand for new...

We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the...

A model is considered where firms internalize the regret costs that consumers experience when they see an unexpected price change. Regret costs are assumed to be increasing in the size of price changes and this can explain why the size of price increases is less sensitive to inflation than in...

The durability of health care treatment, the substantial technical change in health care treatment, and the prevalence of third-party payment interact to create substantial difficulty in measuring the price and output of health care. This paper provides a framework for analyzing the demand for...

Microgiving, a new form of digital fundraising, operates by soliciting minuscule, recurring donations from large numbers of potential donors. We evaluate a charity subscription program operated by Alibaba, China's largest retail platform, which allows sellers to pledge a tiny portion of a...

We propose a new method to test for efficient risk pooling that allows for intertemporal smoothing, non-homothetic consumption, and heterogeneous risk and time preferences. The method is composed of three steps. The first one allows for precautionary savings by the aggregate risk pooling group....

There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...

Open source methods for creating software rely on developers who voluntarily reveal code in the expectation that other developers will reciprocate. Open source incentives are distinct from earlier uses of intellectual property, leading to different types of inefficiencies and different biases in...

We study the production of knowledge when many researchers or inventors are involved, in a setting where tensions can arise between individual public and private contributions. We first show that without some kind of coordination, production of the public knowledge good (science or research...