We report results from a large randomized natural field experiment conducted in southwestern China in the context of insurance for sows. Our study sheds light on two important questions about microinsurance. First, how does access to formal insurance affect farmers' production decisions? Second,...

The problem of allocating bundles of indivisible objects without transfers arises in the assignment of courses to students, of computing resources like CPU time, memory and disk space to computing tasks and the truck loads of food to food banks. In these settings the complementarities in...

In many real world negotiations, from wage contract bargaining to product liability disputes, the bargaining parties often interact repeatedly and have the option of seeking outside judgement. This paper studies a model of repeated bargaining with a third party to analyze how and why bargaining...

Marcet and Marimon (1994, revised 1998) developed a recursive saddle point method which can be used to solve dynamic contracting problems that include participation, enforcement and incentive constraints. Their method uses a recursive multiplier to capture implicit prior promises to the agent(s)...

We study the attitude of decision makers to skewed noise. For a binary lottery that yields the better outcome with probability $p$, we identify noise around $p$, with a compound lottery that induces a distribution over the exact value of the probability and has an average value p. We propose and...

Maximizing subjective expected utility is the classic model of decision making under uncertainty. Savage (1954) provides axioms on preference over acts that are equivalent to the existence of a subjective expected utility representation, and further establishes that such a representation is...

Many violations of the Independence axiom of Expected Utility can be traced to subjects' attraction to risk-free prospects. Negative Certainty Independence, the key axiom in this paper, formalizes this tendency. Our main result is a utility representation of all preferences over monetary...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments’ popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...