We study minimal conditions for competitive behavior with few agents, adapting the strategic market game of Dubey (1982), Simon (1984) and Benassy (1986) to an indivisible good environment. We show that all Nash equilibrium outcomes with active trading are competitive if and only if there are at...

Can public mood swings that make all voters undergo an ideological shift towards a policy, hurt the electoral performance of that policy? The answer depends interestingly on the operations of an apolitical, viewership-maximizing dominant media. The media chooses news quality about fundamental...

We develop a simple model of collective experimentation and take it to the lab. In equilibrium, as in the recent work of Strulovici (2010), majority rule has a bias toward under-experimentation, as good news for a minority of voters may lead a majority of voters to abandon a policy when each of...

This paper surveys research of lab experiments on voting games, focusing on six areas that have received much attention in the last few decades: (i) costly voting in elections with two alternatives; (ii) (other) collective action problems; (iii) elections with more than two alternatives; (iv)...

Consider a decision maker who has to choose one of several alternatives, and who is imperfectly informed about the payoff of each of them. In each period, the decision maker has to decide whether to stop and take one of the alternatives, or to continue researching the alternatives. New...

We describe Peru's experience of chronic inflation through the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the need for inflationary taxation in a regime of fiscal dominance of monetary policy. Hyperinflation occurred when further debt accumulation became unavailable, and a populist administration engaged in...

Following Richter (1966), we provide criteria under which a preference relation implied by a finite set of choice observations has a complete extension that can in turn be represented by a utility function. These criteria rely on a mapping over preference relations, the rational closure, which...

We use a database generated by a policy intervention that incentivized learning as measured by standardized exams to investigate empirically the relationship between cheating by students and cash incentives to students and teachers. We adapt methods from the education measurement literature to...

We consider a canonical two-period model of elections with adverse selection (hidden preferences) and moral hazard (hidden actions), in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. We prove existence of electoral equilibria, and we show that office holders mix between...

We propose and develop an algebraic approach to revealed preference. Our approach dispenses with non algebraic structure, such as topological assumptions. We provide an algebraic axiom of revealed preference that subsumes previous, classical revealed preference axioms, and show that a dataset is...