Many empirical studies of auctions show that prices of identical goods sold sequentially follow a declining path. Declining prices have been viewed as an anomaly, because the theoretical models of auctions predict that the price sequence should either be a martingale (with independent signals...

This paper analyses the behaviour of contestants in one of the most popular TV gameshows ever to estimate risk aversion. This gameshow has a number of features that makes it well suited for our analysis: the format is extremely straightforward, it involves no strategic decision-making, we have a...

In a world where graduate incomes are uncertain (observation of the UK graduate wages from 1993 to 2003) and the higher education is financed through governmental loan (UK Higher Education Reform 2004), we build a theoretical model to show which scheme between an income contingent loan and a...

In a world where graduate incomes are uncertain and higher education is financed through governmental loans, we build a theoretical model to show whether an income contingent loan (ICL) or a mortgage loan (ML) is preferred for higher levels of uncertainty. Assuming a single lifetime shock on...

I reconsider Stiglitz's (1977) problem of monopolistic insurance with a continuum of types. Using a suitable transformation of control variables I obtain an analytical characterization of the optimal insurance policies. Closed form solutions and comparative statics results for special cases are...

People exhibit group reciprocity when they retaliate, not against a person who harmed them, but against another person in that person's group. We tested for group reciprocity in laboratory experiments. Subjects played a Prisoner's Dilemma with partners from different groups. They then allocated...