This paper is about freedom of choice and rigidity of choice rules as incentive devices. We study the optimal design of an agent's freedom of choice when his information is endogenous and costly to acquire. We show that curtailing the agent's authority over decision-making may be optimal even if...

This paper studies the impact of cash constraints on equilibrium winning probabilities in a patent race between an incumbent and an entrant. We develop a model where cash-constrained firms finance their R&D expenditures with an investor who cannot verify their effort. In equilibrium, the...

This paper combines theories of communication with theories of expertise and teams. Facing a team of experts, who must be given incentives to acquire information and to communicate it truthfully, how can and how should the leader communicate with the team members ? We characterize all the...

In a dynamic model of assignment problems, small deviations suffice to move between stable outcomes. This result is used to obtain no-selection and almost-no-selection results under the stochastic stability concept for uniform and payoff-dependent errors. There is no-selection of partner or...

This paper documents a positive relationship between mineral resources abundance and individualistic values in the United States. We refer to "individualism" as the set of values opposed to public intervention in income allocation and favorable to individual selfresponsibility. We show that...

It is shown that a matching market with contracts may be embedded into a matching market with salaries under weaker assumptions on preferences than substitutability. In particular, the result applies to the recently studied problem of cadet-to-branch matching. As an application of the embedding...

We study the effectiveness of public investment in stimulating an economy stuck in a liquidity trap. We do so in the context of a tractable new-Keynesian economy in which a fraction of government spending increases the stock of public capital subject to a time-to-build constraint. Public...

During the European sovereign debt crisis, most countries that ran into fiscal trouble had Catholic majorities, whereas countries with Protestant majorities were able to avoid fiscal problems. Survey data show that, within Germany, views on the euro differ between Protestants and...

We explore the role played by trade costs for the home bias in trade. In a series of Cournot duopoly experiments with a home and an export market, we compare output choices when firms face different levels of export costs. We find that there is two-way trade in identical products and that firms...

We study the dynamic general equilibrium of an economy where risk averse shareholders delegate the management of the firm to risk averse managers. The optimal contract has two main components: an incentive component corresponding to a non-tradable equity position and a variable 'salary'...