When the asset market is incomplete, competitive equilibria are constrained suboptimal, which provides a scope for pareto improving interventions. Price regulation can be such a pareto improving policy, even when the welfare effects of rationing are taken into account. An appealing aspect of...

“Buy local” arrangements encourage members of a community or group to patronize one another rather than the external economy. They range from formal mechanisms such as local currencies to informal “I’ll buy from you if you buy from me” arrangements, and are often championed on social...

We show that if agents are risk neutral, prizes outperform wages if and only if there is sufficient pride and envy relative to the noisiness of performance. If agents are risk averse, prizes are a necessary supplement to wages (as bonuses).

We propose a unified framework to study relational contracting and hold-up problems in infinite horizon stochastic games. We first illustrate that with respect to long run decisions, the common formulation of relational contracts as Pareto-optimal public perfect equilibria is in stark contrast...

We show that if agents are risk neutral, prizes outperform wages when there is sufficient pride and envy relative to the noisiness of performance. If agents are risk averse, prizes are a necessary supplement to wages (as bonuses).

In this paper we offer an explanation for the practice of dual distribution. the simultaneous use of franchises and company owned outlets for distributing new products. Our explanation rests on the observation that franchisors often acquire private information, not available to franchisees, on...

We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects. In a controlled laboratory experiment we show that exogenous variation of second-order expectations (promisors' expectations about promisees' expectations that the promise...

We compare general equilibrium economies in which building and maintenance of a depreciating public facility is financed either by anonymous voluntary contributions or by taxing agents on their income from private production. Agents start with an endowment of private goods and money, while the...

We replicate the essentials of the Huettel et al. (2006) experiment on choice under uncertainty with 30 Yale undergraduates, where subjects make 200 pair-wise choices between risky and ambiguous lotteries. Inferences about the independence of economic preferences for risk and ambiguity are...