Two groups of voters of known sizes disagree over a single binary decision to be taken by simple majority. Individuals have different, privately observed intensities of preferences and before voting can buy or sell votes among themselves for money. We study the implication of such trading for...

This paper tests the insiders’ dilemma hypothesis in a laboratory experiment. The insiders’ dilemma means that a profitable merger does not occur, because it is even more profitable for each firm to unilaterally stand as an outsider (Stigler, 1950; Kamien and Zang, 1990 and 1993). The...

School choice aims to improve (1) the matching between children and schools and (2) students’ educational outcomes. Yet, the concern is that disadvantaged families are less able to exercise choice, which raises (3) equity concerns. The Boston mechanism (BM) is a procedure that is widely used...

This Paper shows that identical offers in an ultimatum game generate systematically different rejection rates depending on the other offers that are available to the proposer. This result casts doubt on the consequentialist practice in economics of defining the utility of an action solely in...

We design an experiment to study the effects of social identity on preferences over redistribution. The experiment highlights the trade-off between social identity concerns and maximization of monetary payoffs. Subjects belonging to two distinct natural groups are randomly assigned gross incomes...

Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) question the relevance of inequity aversion in simple dictator game experiments claiming that a combination of a preference for efficiency and a Rawlsian motive for helping the least well-off is more important than inequity aversion. We show that these results...

This paper reviews a number of recent contributions that demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by clarifying the role of citation analysis in...

A vast literature has investigated the relationship between trust and aggregate economic performance. We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs available...

This Paper considers a time-inconsistent individual who has the ability to make promises that lead to a financial or reputation loss if broken. We first identify conditions under which promises made are kept, and conditions under which they are (partially) broken. Second, we endogenize the...

In this paper we organize the literature on the economics of terrorism around seven different topics, offering a comprehensive view of the literature with a view to identifying questions that remain unanswered. The chosen topic areas are: The Measurement of Terrorist Activity, The Nature of...