Just and efficient allocations of charity have attracted much academic and media attention. The sources of inefficiency and unjust are important to understand yet understudied. Our study aims to fill this void by directly modelling the victims' market in a collective reputation framework. By...

In a world of imperfect information, reputations often guide the sequential decisions to trust and to reward trust. We consider two-player situations where the players meet but once. One player - the truster - decides whether to trust, and the other player - the temptee - has a temptation to...

Blockchain front-running involves multiple agents, other than the legitimate agent, claiming a payment from performing a contract. It arises because of the public nature of blockchain transactions and potential network congestion. This paper notes that disputes over payments are similar to...

In collaboration with a state environmental regulator in India, we conducted a field experiment to raise the frequency of environmental inspections to the prescribed minimum for a random set of industrial plants. The treatment was successful when judged by process measures, as treatment plants,...

Assigning a third party at the 75th percentile of the centrality distribution (as compared to the 25th) increases efficiency by 21% relative to the mean: we attribute 2/5 of the effect to monitoring and 3/5 to enforcement. The largest efficiency increase occurs when senders and receivers are...

Coordination is central to social interactions. Theory and conventional lab experiments suggest that cheap talk/communication can enhance coordination under certain conditions. Two aspects that remain underexplored are (1) the interaction between the number of players (group size) and...

This paper uses an aggregative games framework to predict consumer welfare when market structure is endogenously determined. Our main results characterize mergers whose synergies reduce consumer welfare by inducing rivals to exit. The conditions under which such mergers arise are broad,...

We study how people think others update their beliefs upon encountering new evidence. We find that when two individuals share the same prior, one believes that new evidence cannot systematically shift the other's beliefs in either direction (Martingale property). When the two have different...

This is a paper in the ``economists ruin everything'' field. It considers whether Catch-22 situations can persist as an equilibrium phenomenon. Rather than being an arbitrary rule or a set of self-serving beliefs, the focus is on the preferences of Gatekeepers who choose to create such...

Global games of regime change -- that is, coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it -- have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We...