In this paper, we adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior --- which supposes that each household member is characterized by his/her own preferences and the decision process results in Pareto-efficient outcomes --- and assume, in addition, that agents are egoistic and consumption is...

We conduct an experiment to explore the durability and transferability of the increase in contributions to a public good resulting from the existence of a particular type of implicit informal sanction. Rege and Telle (2003) find that in one-shot games, the sanctioning system leads to high...

We consider competitive bidding for a business license, via an open ascending-price auction, between two symmetric incumbents and a potential entrant, each of whom is privately informed about her own valuation of the license. Entry stands to reduce the payoff of each incumbent below that in...

This paper studies the role of bundling in the efficient provision of excludable public goods. We show that bundling in the provision of unrelated public goods can enhance social welfare. With a large number of goods and agents, first best can be approximated with pure bundling. For a parametric...

According to globalization, certain kinds of public goods, which used to be working as the goods just in a national economy, are getting internationalized or released for foreigners as well. In addition, those goods often exhibit differentiated features for a certain degree. The goods as such...

Microfinance programmes provide poor people with small loans given to jointly liable self-selected groups. Follow-up loans provide incentives to repay. In an experiment we investigate the influence of those features on strategic default. Each group member invests in an individual risky project,...

In a typical corporate hierarchy, the manager is delegated the authority to make decisions that set directions for the organization, employ subordinates and contract with external suppliers. This paper explains when such delegation of authority can be optimal, using a model of a firm with three...

Promising emerging equity markets often witness investment herds and frenzies, accompanied by an abundance of media coverage. Complementarity in information acquisition can explain these anomalies. Because information has a high fixed cost of production, its equilibrium price is low when...

Liquid markets where agents have limited capacity to sign exclusive contracts, as well as imperfect knowledge of previous transactions by others, raise the following risk: An agent can promise the same asset to multiple counterparties and subsequently default. I show that in such markets an...

This paper is about freedom of choice and rigidity of choice rules as incentive devices. We study the optimal design of an agent's freedom of choice when his information is endogenous and costly to acquire. We show that curtailing the agent's authority over decision-making may be optimal even if...