We use queuing-related behavior as an instrument for assessing the social appeal of alternative cultural norms. Specifically, we study the behavior of rational and sophisticated individuals who stand in a given queue waiting to be served, and who, in order to speed up the process, consider...

Attempts to curb illegal activity through regulation gets complicated when agents can adapt to circumvent enforcement. Economic theory suggests that conducting audits on a predictable schedule, and (counter-intuitively) at high frequency, can undermine the effectiveness of audits. We conduct a...

We document a large and persistent anomaly in the UK car insurance market over the period 2012-13: insurance companies charged a higher premium for third-party (liability) insurance than comprehensive insurance (which includes third-party). Furthermore, some companies charged higher prices for...

This paper studies the design of health insurance with ex post moral hazard, when there is imperfect competition in the market for the medical product. Various scenarios, such as monopoly pricing, price negotiation or horizontal differentiation are considered. The insurance contract specifies...

This paper considers an economy where individuals differ in productivity and in risk. Rochet (1991) has shown that when private insurance markets offer full coverage at fair rates, social insurance is desirable if and only if risk and productivity are negatively correlated. This condition is...

This paper examines the age-related design of firing taxes by extending the theory of job creation and job destruction to account for a finite working life-time. We first argue that the potential employment gains related to employment protection are high for older workers, but higher firing...

This paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education. We first develop a model that shows that, at the Nash equilibrium, the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her Katz-Bonacich centrality measure. This...

In developing societies, social norms typically ascribe differential weights to paternal, maternal and communal (or state) contributions to children's expenses. Individuals internalize these valuations. I examine a Cournot model of voluntary contribution to children's goods in a two-adult...

This paper studies the effects of different income transfers on individual welfare, in both marriage and divorce situations, and on family decisions. We assume three generations within the family. We develop a sequential game that, in a first stage, determines the optimum level of the transfer...

Consider a model of bargaining, in which two players, 1 and 2, share a pie of size y. The bargaining environment is described by a set of parameters [lamda] that may affect agents' preferences over the agreement sharing, the status quo outcome, or both. The outcomes (i.e., whether an agreement...