This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences (values), material or other explicit incentives (laws) and social sanctions or rewards (norms). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals’ behaviors...

This paper analyzes the impact of labor market competition and skill-biased technical change on the structure of compensation. The model combines multitasking and screening, embedded into a Hotelling-like framework. Competition for the most talented workers leads to an escalating reliance on...

The proliferation of new payment methods on the Internet rekindles the old and unsettled debate about merchants’ incentive and ability to differentiate price according to payment choice. This paper develops an imperfect-information framework for the analysis of platform and social regulation...

This paper seeks to bridge the gap between economists focused on designing competitive market mechanisms and engineers focused on the physical attributes and engineering requirements they perceive as being needed for operating a reliable electric power system. The paper starts by deriving the...

This paper empirically explores standard-setting organizations’ policy choices. Consistent with Lerner-Tirole (2006), we find (a) a negative relationship between the extent to which an SSO is oriented to technology sponsors and the concession level required of sponsors and (b) a positive...

Unemployment insurance and employment protection are typically discussed and studied in isolation. ln this paper, we argue that they are tightly linked, and we focus on their joint optimal design in a simple model, with risk averse workers, risk neutral firms, and random shocks to productivity....

The paper analyzes two controversial features of the credit card industry. The first is the cooperative determination of the interchange fee by member banks in credit card associations (Visa and MasterCard). The interchange fee is the ``access charge'' paid by the merchants' banks, the...

This paper explains why people value self-confidence, and how this concern shapes their informational strategies and intertemporal decisions. The theory has applications in areas as diverse as labour supply, savings and investment, or education and career decisions. People generally have...

This Paper studies the internal commitment mechanisms or ‘personal rules’ (diets, exercise regimens, resolutions, moral or religious precepts, etc.) through which people seek to achieve self-control. Our theory is based on the idea of self-reputation over one’s willpower, which potentially...

Payment card associations offer both debit and credit cards and, until recently, engaged in a tie-in on the merchant side through the so-called honour-all-cards (HAC) rule. The HAC rule came under attack on the grounds that the credit and debit card markets are separate markets and that the...