This paper revisits the airline schedule-buffer choice problem analyzed by Brueckner, Czerny and Gaggero (2020) using a simpler model where the random shocks influencing flight times are discrete rather than continuous. The analysis yields closed-form solutions for the flight and ground buffers...

This paper presents an extensive theoretical and empirical analysis of the choice of schedule buffers by airlines. With airline delays a continuing problem around the world, such an under-taking is valuable, and its lessons extend to other passenger transportation sectors. One useful lesson from...

We consider a multi-service transportation system in which passengers are heterogeneous along two dimensions, namely ideal departure time and value of time, leading to both horizontal and vertical differentiation. We investigate the behavior of passengers, and assess how service pricing and...

We introduce a model of the banking sector that formally incorporate a buffer function of capital. Heterogeneous banks choose their portfolio risk, bank size, and capital holdings. Banks voluntarily hold equity when the buffer effect against the risk of default outweighs the cost advantages of...

In many markets supply contracts include a series of small, regular payments made by consumers and a single, large bonus that consumers receive at some point during the contractual period. But, if for instance its production costs exceed its value to consumers, such a bonus creates...

We argue that risk sharing motivates the bank-wide structure of bonus pay. In the presence of financial frictions that make external financing costly, the optimal contract between shareholders and employees involves some degree of risk sharing whereby bonus pay partially absorbs earnings shocks....

We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of...

This paper studies how pay transparency affects organizations that reward employees based on their efforts (i.e., using “subjective performance evaluation”). First, we show that transparency triggers social comparisons that require the organization to pay its employees an “envy premium”....

Federal and state governments often differ in the capacity to pre-commit to expenditure and tax policy. Whether the implied sequence of public decisions has any efficiency implications is the subject of this paper. We resort to a setting which contrary to most of the literature does not exhibit...

What happens when employers would like to screen their employees but only observe a subset of output? We specify a model in which heterogeneous employees respond by producing more of the observed output at the expense of the unobserved output. Though this substitution distorts output in the...