In the public sector, employment may be inefficiently high because of patronage, and wages may be inefficiently high because of public employee interest groups. This paper explores whether the initiative process, a direct democracy institution of growing importance, ameliorates these political...

Public transit accounts for 1 percent of U.S. passenger miles traveled but attracts strong public support. Using a simple choice model, we predict that transit riders are likely to be individuals who commute along routes with severe roadway delays. These individuals' choices thus have high...

Recent articles have shown that contracts can support the efficient outcome for bilateral trade even in the face of specific investments and incomplete contracting. These studies typically considered 'selfish' investments that benefit the investor (e.g., the seller's investment reduces her...

We study the design of mechanisms satisfying a novel desideratum: privacy. This requires the mechanism not reveal "much" about any agent's type to other agents. We propose the notion of joint differential privacy: a variant of differential privacy used in the privacy literature. We show by...

Many real matching markets are subject to distributional constraints. These constraints often take the form of restrictions on the numbers of agents on one side of the market matched to certain subsets on the other side. Real-life examples include restrictions on regions in medical matching,...

I propose a new solution concept—behavioral equilibrium—to study environments with players who are naive, in the sense that they fail to account for the informational content of other players' actions. I apply the framework to certain adverse selection settings and show that, contrary to the...

This paper reports laboratory data for games that are played only once. These games span the standard categories: static and dynamic games with complete and incomplete information. For each game, the treasure is a treatment in which behavior conforms nicely to predictions of the Nash equilibrium...