Social status, or prestige, is an important motive for buying art or collectibles and for participation in charity auctions. We study a symmetric private value auction with prestige motives, in which the auction outcome is used by an outside observer to infer the bidders’ types. We elicit...

Markets are incomplete when the assets available to the agents do not span the space of future contingencies. Efficiency is then assessed by the weak criterion of "constrained efficiency" (efficiency relative to the set of allocations compatible with the asset structure). That criterion requires...

We investigate whether the plurality rule aggregates information efficiently in large elections with multiple alternatives, in which voters have common interests. Voters’ preferences depend on an unknown state of nature, and they receive imprecise private signals about the state of nature...

Global income taxation in the country of residence is a legal dogma of international taxation. We question this dogma from the perspective of relations with developing countries from a legal and economic perspective, and make a modern and fair proposal for tax treaties. We will show under which...

In this paper, we discuss the choice for build-operate-and-transfer (BOT) concessions when governments and firm managers do not share the same information regarding the operation characteristics of a facility. We show that larger shadow costs of public funds and larger information asymmetries...

In this paper, we consider a population of individuals who differ in two dimensions: their risk type (expected loss) and their risk aversion. We solve for the profit maximizing menu of contracts that a monopolistic insurer puts out on the market. First, we find that it is never optimal to fully...

This paper identifies the optimal two-period price sequence in the attempt for selling a good, with take-it-or-leave-it offers, when the seller faces ambiguity about the buyers' willingness to pay. If the first round fails, the seller updates its beliefs on the state of the market in accordance...

Noise-induced pollution constitutes a hot and topical societal problem for all major airports. This paper discusses various issues in the implementation of a market for noise licenses as a solution to solve the noise externality between the residents located around airports and the aircrafts...

I develop a model of stochastic costly signaling in the presence of exogenous imperfect information, and study whether equilibrium signaling decreases ('information substitutes') or increases ('information complements') if the accuracy of exogenous information increases. A stochastic pure costly...

In this paper, we study a pure exchange economy with idiosyncratic uncertainty, hidden action and multiple consumption goods.We consider two different market structures: contingent markets on the one hand, and financial and spot markets on the otherhand. We propose a competitive equilibrium...