The existence of punishment opportunities has been shown to cause efficiency in public goods experiments to increase considerably. In this paper we ask whether punishment also has a downside in terms of process dissatisfaction. We conduct an experiment to study the conjecture that an environment...

We show that the full version of the so-called "rural hospital theorem" generalizes to many-to-many matching problems where agents on both sides of the problem have substitutable and weakly separable preferences. We reinforce our result by showing that when agents' preferences satisfy...

This paper studies many-to-one matching markets where each student is assigned to a hospital. Each hospital has possibly multiple positions and responsive preferences. We study the game induced by the student-optimal stable matching mechanism. We assume that students play their weakly dominant...

Evidence showing that individual behavior often deviates from the classical principle of preference maximization has raised at least two important questions: (i) How serious are the deviations? and (ii) What is the best way to analyse choice behavior in order to extract information for the...

Welfare is a rather vague term whose meaning depends on ideology, values and judgments. Material resources are just means to enhance peoples well-being, but growth of the Gross Domestic Production is still the standard measure of the success of a society. Fortunately, recent advances in...

There is ample evidence to show that choice behavior often deviates from the classical principle of maximization. This evidence raises at least two important questions: (i) how severe the deviation is and (ii) which method is the best for extracting relevant information from the choices of the...

We consider two-sided many-to-many matching markets in which each worker may work for multiple firms and each firm may hire multiple workers. We study individual and group manipulations in centralized markets that employ (pairwise) stable mechanisms and that require participants to submit rank...

We study random assignment economies with expected-utility agents, each of them eventually obtaining a single object. Inspired on Hylland and Zeckhauser’s (1979) Pseudomarket mechanism (PM) and on a serial dictatorship, we introduce the Sequential Pseudomarket (SP) where groups of agents...

Why do public-sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits? This paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers' ’and government employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot...

The classic theory of fiscal federalism suggests that different people should have different governments. Yet, separate local governments with homogeneous constituents often end up doing poorly. This paper explains why and answers three questions: when regions are heterogeneous, what determines...