This paper shows that public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals consume both public and private goods. The government's involvement in the provision of private goods provides it with information about individuals' private...

This paper studies the optimal provision mechanism for multiple excludable public goods when agents' valuations are private information. For a parametric class of problems with binary valuations, we demonstrate that the optimal mechanism involves bundling if a regularity condition, akin to a...

The standard economic model of police stops implies that the contraband hit rate should rise when the number of stops or searches per officer falls, ceteris paribus. We provide empirical corroboration of such optimizing models of police behavior by examining changes in stops and frisks around...

A wealth of evidence shows that individuals are biased and firms can often exploit consumers' behavioral biases in their contract designs. In this paper, we study how vulnerable biased individuals are to their own behavioral biases in market equilibrium, and focus on the role of risk aversion...

Psychological insights have made inroads within most major areas of study in economics. One area where less advance has been made is environmental and resource economics. In this study, we examine the implications of preference reversals over evaluation modes, in which stated economic values...

Are individuals expected utility maximizers? This question represents much more than academic curiosity. In a normative sense, at stake are the fundamental underpinnings of the bulk of the last half-century's models of choice under uncertainty. From a positive perspective, the ubiquitous use of...