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.

When players compete repeatedly, prizes won in earlier contests may improve the players’ abilities in later contests. This paper determines the allocation of prizes within and across contests that maximizes the (weighted) sum of aggregate efforts.

One can restructure institutions, but if individual-level motivations for corrupt behavior are not understood, these restructuring may not be effective. We introduce an evolutionary-game modeling to deal with the problem of corruption driven by imitative behavior.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of contracting decisions in the provision of welfare-to-work (WTW) services. Our findings suggest that contracting decisions are predominantly driven by cost considerations, both for the decision to contract with other municipalities and the share of...

In the standard market-microstructure model of Glosten and Milgrom (1985), public information can have negative social value. Equivalently, an increase in informational asymmetry can raise the total surplus from trade.

An alternative is a Condorcet winner if it beats all other alternatives in a pairwise majority vote. A social choice correspondence is a Condorcet extension if it selects the Condorcet winners–and nothing else–whenever a Condorcet winner exists. It is well known that Condorcet extensions are...

The paper investigates the influence of path dependence on corruption in Russian regions. We show that even twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, regions with a higher share of Communist Party members in the 1970s have substantially higher corruption.

Do corrupt people self select themselves in professions where the scope of corruption is high? We conduct a corruption experiment with private sector job aspirants and aspirants of Indian bureaucracy. The game models embezzlement of resources in which “supervisors” evaluate the performance...

We argue that subsidized food distribution systems that fail to publicize how much food has been allocated to each local market will experience high rates of theft on the margin as they are expanded. We provide the first comparable cross-section of estimates of subsidized food theft. As...

This study finds that countries with high-IQ populations enjoy less corruption. I propose that this is because intelligent people have longer time horizons.