This paper analyses a model of private unemployment insurance under limited commitment and a model of public unemployment insurance subject to moral hazard in an economy with a continuum of agents and an infinite time horizon. The dynamic and steady-state properties of the optimum private...

We consider a frictional two-sided matching market in which one side uses public cheap-talk announcements so as to attract the other side. We show that if the first-price auction is adopted as the trading protocol, then cheap talk can be perfectly informative, and the resulting market outcome is...

This paper considers the effects of changes in the income distribution in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. We introduce a new methodology to compare the behavior of agents that occupy the...

A new method is proposed for the analysis of first price and all pay auctions, where bidding functions are written not as functions of values but as functions of the rank or quantile of the bidder’s value in the distribution from which it was drawn. This method gives new results in both...

In many markets it is possible to find rival sellers charging different prices for the same good. Earlier research has attempted to explain this phenomenon by demonstrating the existence of dispersed price equilibria when consumers must make use of costly search to discover prices. We ask...

This paper considers the effect of inequality when there are concerns for status. We analyse the effects of linear redistributive taxes in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. This increase in...

We investigate games whose Nash equilibria are mixed and are unstable under fictitious play-like learning processes. We show that when players learn using weighted stochastic fictitious play and so place greater weight on more recent experience that the time average of play often converges in...

Recent stochastic evolutionary models have shown that the most likely convention when the probability of a mutation is sufficiently small is coordination on the risk-dominant strategy rather than the payoff-dominant one. This paper looks at the consequences of player movement between locations...

We analyze experimentally two sender-receiver games with conflictive preferences. In the first game, the sender can choose to tell the truth, to lie, or to remain silent. The latter strategy is costly and similar to an outside option. If sent, the receiver can either trust or distrust the...

Society often allocates valuable resources - such as prestigious positions, salaries, or marriage partners - via tournament-like institutions. In such situations, inequality affects incentives to compete and hence has a direct effect on equilibrium choices and hence material outcomes. We...