The relationship between policyholders and an Islamic insurance (takaful) operator is in essence a principal-agent relationship. This paper analyzes the power of incentives offered to takaful operators in mitigating problems associated with such a relationship. These incentives include wakalah,...

We contrast a standard deterministic signaling game with one where the signal-generating mechanism is stochastic. With stochastic signals a unique equilibrium emerges that involves separation and has intuitive comparative-static properties as the degree of signaling depends on the prior type...

This paper is about the diffusion of cooperation in an infinite population of networked individuals repeatedly playing a Prisoner's Dilemma. We formulate conditions on payoffs and network structure such that, starting from an initial seed group, imitative learning results in the overall adoption...

Laboratory market experiments observe a sharp dichotomy between (selfish) competitive behavior and fair-minded social behavior depending on competitive conditions. While the dichotomy is consistent with social preference theory, the often advanced hypothesis that social behavior is an artifact...

Economic intuition suggests competition lowers prices. However, recent theoretical work reveals a monopolist may prefer to charge a lower price than a seller facing a competitor with a differentiated product depending upon the joint distribution of buyer values for the products. We explore this...

The definition of emergence remains problematic, particularly for systems with purposeful human interactions. This study explores the practical import of this concept within a specific market context: namely, a double-auction market for wholesale electric power that operates over a transmission...

We estimate a dynamic profit-maximization model of a fish wholesaler who can observe consumer characteristics, set individual prices, and thus engage in third-degree price discrimination. Simulated prices and quantities from the model exhibit the key features observed in a set of high quality...

The empirical analysis of fish markets always reveals strong price dispersion for homogeneous or very similar goods. The problem is how to explain this price dispersion on a market where there is no evident arbitrage. Explanations proposed by different authors include differences in...

This paper reports an experiment that examines the relative convergence properties of differentiated-product Cournot and Bertrand oligopolies. Overall, Bertrand markets tend to converge to Nash equilibrium predictions more quickly and more completely than Cournot markets. Further, when products...

We consider a multilateral Nash demand game in which short-sighted players come to the bargaining table with requests for both coalition partners and the potentially generated resource. We prove that the resulting process converges with probability one to a state in which all players agree on a...