Digital platforms like Uber can enhance market transparency and mitigate moral hazard via ratings of buyers and sellers, real-time monitoring, and low-cost complaint channels. We compare driver choices at Uber with taxis by matching trips so they are subject to the same optimal route. We also...

We characterize the price-transparency role of benchmarks in over-the-counter markets. A benchmark can, under conditions, raise social surplus by increasing the volume of beneficial trade, facilitating more efficient matching between dealers and customers, and reducing search costs. Although the...

This paper analyzes how different organizational structures between funding and implementing agencies affect the quality of aid delivered and social agendas pursued across neighboring villages in a set disaster context. We model the implied objective functions and trade-offs concerning aid...

This paper examines the relationship between membership in social fraternities and sororities and binge drinking among 18-24 year old full-time four-year college students who participated in the 1995 National College Health Risk Behavior Survey. To deal with unobserved heterogeneity in binge...

Open source methods for creating software rely on developers who voluntarily reveal code in the expectation that other developers will reciprocate. Open source incentives are distinct from earlier uses of intellectual property, leading to different types of inefficiencies and different biases in...

We report a puzzling pair of facts concerning the organization of science. The concentration of research output is declining at the department level but increasing at the individual level. For example, in evolutionary biology, over the period 1980 to 2000, the fraction of citation-weighted...

This paper considers the role of the allocation of scientific credit in determining the organization of science. We examine changes in that organization and the nature of credit allocation in the past half century. Our contribution is a formal model of that organizational choice that considers...

We study the impact of information and communication technology on growth through its impact on organization and innovation. Agents accumulate knowledge through two activities: innovation (discovering new technologies) and exploitation (learning how to use the current technology). Exploitation...

In the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy, nearly 9% of output is not accounted for as payments to either physical capital or labor. The value of this output is a little larger than the value of the stock of physical capital. We build a model to measure how much of this output can be...

We present quantitative and qualitative evidence (field research) on university technology transfer offices (TTOs). These offices negotiate licensing agreements with firms to commercialize university-based technologies. A stochastic frontier production function framework is used to assess the...