According to Kim and Lee (1997), property taxes as opposed to capital gain taxes and taxes on rent endanger dynamic efficiency. The present paper shows that the choice of the tax base is immaterial. What counts is whether the taxes eliminate the after-tax rent. Empirical evidence suggests that...

Since Thaler (1981), we have lived with the uncomfortable stylized fact that many humans choose strictly dominated actions in intertemporal choice experiments. We designed an experiment to probe the reasons for the apparently suboptimal behavior, and we find that the classic Fisher (1930)...

We use a multiple price list approach with real payments to elicit long-term time preferences on a sample of French farmers. Elicited individual discount rates vary with the time delay, which supports the existence of a reversal effect in long-term time preferences, and increase with rewards,...

This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and a fully funded social security system in an overlapping generations model with family altruism. It is shown that funded social security may harm growth if there are operative bequests within the family.

We consider procedures that use randomness to make a decision that involves several individuals. We asked subjects to compare the fairness of six pairs of seemingly equivalent procedures. We propose a classification of subjects into two categories: those who are “emotional” in the sense...

We study exchanges between three overlapping generations with non-dynastic altruism. The middleaged choose informal care provided to their parents and education expenditures for their children. The young enjoy their education, while the old may leave a bequest to their children. Within each...

It is shown that rent-seeking contests with continuous and independent type distributions possess a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium.

Trendsetters wish to be perceived as the type that defines normative behavior. Incorporating norm formation in Bernheim (1994)’s model yields equilibria with social considerations concentrating behavior, allowing multiple conformist pools. Refinements link each pooling equilibrium to a unique...

Some problems are more easily solved if context is provided. A stylized result from beauty contest experiments is that most choices are consistent with level-1 or level-2 thinking rather than the Nash equilibrium. The beauty contest experiment reported in this paper includes treatments in which...

We consider a differential game with a corrupt government and civil society as its players. We characterize open-loop and feedback Nash equilibria and find that, whereas it is in the best interest of the government not to commit to a repression policy, civil society is better off precommitting...