A bank that needs a public bail-out to avoid liquidation can use financial contracts to provide contingent liquidation rights to investors and force the government to increase public support. Limiting the size of the bail-out before knowing the bank’s financial condition decreases welfare if...

Under a deadweight loss of tax and transfer, there is tension between the optimal policy choices of a Rawlsian social planner and a utilitarian social planner. However, when with a weight greater than a certain critical value the individuals’ utility functions incorporate distaste for low...

We introduce an augmented Becker–DeGroot–Marschak mechanism for the revelation of willingness-to-accept and willingness-to-pay in transaction cycles. The mechanism can be used to test for a behavioral anomaly.

Opportunities for shrouded pricing drive down upfront price as firms compete to capture new customers. Unless the surcharge is sufficiently high, consumers are worse off if the practice is banned, assuming Cournot–Nash equilibrium and isoelastic demand.

Subjects who overestimate their performance in experimental tasks unrelated to travel are less willing to insure against failing in the task and also less inclined to buy travel insurance. This suggests intrinsic optimism influences insurance demand and diminishes adverse selection.

This paper is concerned with the problem of extending an antisymmetric binary relation on a set to a linear order on the power set. A necessary and sufficient condition is offered.

This paper concerns optimal taxation and public goods in an economic federation with decentralized leadership, where one lower level government is the first mover also in the horizontal dimension. Under plausible assumptions, horizontal leadership reinforces the incentives created by...

Adapting a methodology proposed in Das et al. (2011), this paper uses panel refreshments as a natural experiment to determine whether trends in stated utility measures observed in panel data are genuine or rather caused by measurement issues.

We add a gift in appreciation of the subject’s contribution to a social reference treatment successfully proven to trigger higher donations, and find that the share of people contributing decreases significantly, thereby eroding the original treatment’s capacity to increase donations.

We study the consequences of a solidarity property that specifies how a value for cooperative games should respond if some player forfeits his productivity, i.e., becomes a null player. Nullified solidarity states that in this case either all players weakly gain together or all players weakly...