More often than not production processes are the joint endeavor of people having different abilities and productivities. Such production processes and the associated surplus production are often not fully transparent in the sense that the relative contributions of involved agents are blurred;...

Government or company decisions on whom to hire are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resources and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts or positions that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is ruled out,...

We provide evidence about the mechanisms linking resource-related income shocks to conflict. Combining temporal variation in international drug prices with spatial variation in the suitability to produce opium, we show that higher drug prices reduce conflict over the 2002-2014 period in...

Ranking methods are fundamental tools in many areas. Popular methods aggregate the statements of 'experts' in different ways. As such, there are various reasonable ranking methods, each one of them more or less adapted to the environment under consideration. This paper introduces a new method,...

We analyze relational contracts for a set of agents when either (a) only aggregate output or (b) individual outputs are observable. A team incentive scheme, where each agent is paid a bonus for aggregate output above a threshold, is optimal in case (a). The team's efficiency may increase...

The fluctuations in incomes inherent in rural communities can be attenuated by reciprocal insurance. We develop a model of such insurance based on self-interested behaviour and voluntary participation. One individual assists another only if the costs of so doing are outweighed by the benefits...

John Maynard Keynes composed The General Theory as a response to the Great Crash and Great Depression with all their devastating consequences for the US macro economy and financial markets, as well as the rest of the world. The role of expectations his new theory set out has been widely...

The current paper broadens the understanding of the role played by uncertainty in the context of macroeconomic fluctuations. It focuses on the implications of uncertainty shocks for indicators that tend to precede financial crises. In an empirical analysis we show for a set of four euro area...

We define an indirect evolutionary approach formally and apply it to (Tullock) contests. While it is known (Leininger, 2003) that the direct evolutionary approach in the form of finite population ESS (Schaffer, 1988) yields more aggressive behavior than in Nash equilibrium, it is now shown that...

International climate negotiations take place in a setting where uncertainties regarding the impacts of climate change are very large. In this paper, we examine the influence of increasing the probability and impact of large climate change damages, also known as the 'fat tail', on the formation...