Martin Stuart ("Marty") Feldstein, currently George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. (NBER), is a renowned American economist who has made important contributions to public finance, macroeconomics,...

This paper reexamines the paradoxical aspect of the electronic mail game (Rubinstein, 1989). The electronic mail game is a coordination game with payoff uncertainty. At a Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the game, players cannot achieve the desired coordination of actions even when a high order of...

In this paper, we attempt to shed light on whether Japanese households are rational or if their behavior is influenced by culture and social norms by examining their saving and bequest behavior. To summarize our main findings, we find that Japan's household saving rate showed great volatility,...

The leading economic explanation for tipping - that is, explanation why the practice is socially beneficial, not why individuals leave tips even though it is not narrowly advantageous to them - is that it confers an incentive to provide personal services. This fits many instances in which...

In dynamic principal-agent relationships, it is sometimes observed that the agent's reward depends only on the final outcome. For example, a student's grade in a course quite often depends only on the final exam score, where the performance in the problem sets and the mid-term exam is ignored....

The purpose of this paper is to investigate contract renegotiation in multi-agent situations where risk averse agents negotiate a contract offer to the principal after they observed a common, unverifiable perfect signal about their actions. Renegotiation gives the agents gains from mutual insurance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how tasks should be allocated in a simple hierarchy consisting of an organizational designer and subordinates, in the framework of a principal-agent relationship with moral hazard.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate how side track (or collusion) among agents affects the principal's welfare in a hidden action model. We assume that the agent's actions are mutually observable but not contradictable among them and hence direct coordination of actions via side...

We consider the allotment problems of homogeneous indivisible objects among agents with single-peaked and risk-averse von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility functions. We establish that the rule satisfies coalitional strategy-proofness, same-sideness, and strong symmetry if and only if it is...

We investigate what types of social factors affect apology behavior for a previous lie and credibility levels for that apology. We abruptly provide subjects an opportunity to send an apology message after completion of the deception game (Gneezy, 2005) and investigate the effects of three main...