In this paper I attempt to investigate the role of governance - as measured by government effectiveness, control of corruption, and rule of law - on the HIV prevalence. Thus, the paper argues that countries whose governments are highly ranked according to these various indices of the quality of...

Intervention policies for HIV/AIDS differ in their approaches, and acceptability to control the spread of the epidemics. We introduce a theoretical model to depict how several factors may determine an individual's maximum willingness to pay for any HIV/AIDS policy. Heterogeneous baseline risks,...

Machina (2007) formulates a number of experiments, and shows that they can be used to test the Choquet expected utility model. We show that one of them can also be used to test the class of maxmin expected utility preferences in Klibanoff (2001). Those preferences are not consistent with Choquet...

This work extends Lazear and Rosen's seminal paper to evaluate the performance of rank order tournaments when agents perform multiple tasks and the principal chooses, together with the prize spread, the weights assigned to each task in determining aggregate performance of each agent. All...

The joint liability literature claims that positive assortative matching, or risk homogeneity, is always the first best solution. We examine this claim in presence of group formation costs and find that the assertion is not always true.

There is evidence that tax rates have varied considerably through time. In the postwar years, changes in business taxation in the U.S. have occurred at a pace of approximately every three years. The purpose of this research is to examine the implications of tax risk and persistence on...

I present a simple model that formalizes Kahneman's (1973) ideas and experimental work on attention limitations. In addition, I extend his framework to account for the interaction between attention and memory deficits. In particular, I propose that individuals optimally allocate their divisible,...

People are generally reluctant to accept risk. In particular, people overvalue sure gains, relative to outcomes which are merely probable. At the same time, people are also more willing to accept bets when payoffs involve losses rather than gains. I consider how far adaptive learning can go in...

A contest model is constructed to examine the existence of conference bias in college basketball's Ratings Percentage Index (RPI). Though a general RPI bias has been identified in previous literature, this is the first study to address whether the bias is random or systematic in nature. Within...