Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

This paper distinguishes uncertainty types that differ continuously with respect to the degree to which uncertainty affects the optimal price/price markup or optimal quantity. A monopoly example is used to show that seemingly strong assumptions on functional forms can represent a wide variety of...

We study the trip scheduling preferences of train commuters in a real-life setting. The underlying data have been collected during large-scale peak avoidance experiment conducted in the Netherlands, in which participants could earn monetary rewards for traveling outside peak hours. The...

When products are sold in advance, i.e. prior to consumption, consumers trade off an early, uninformed purchase at a low price against a late, informed purchase at a high price. This paper considers the effect of market structure on the prevalence of advance selling. We show that in an...

Medical expenditure risk can pose a major threat to living standards. We derive decomposable measures of catastrophic medical expenditure risk from reference-dependent utility with loss aversion. We propose a quantile regression based method of estimating risk exposure from cross-section data...

We consider equilibrium and optimum use of a Vickrey road bottleneck, distinguishing between long-run and short-run scheduling preferences in an otherwise stylized scheduling model. The preference structure reflects that there is a distinction between the (exogenous) 'long-run preferred arrival...

This paper sheds light on a recent empirical controversy about the effect of competition on price discrimination in airline markets (Borenstein and Rose (1994), Gerardi and Shapiro, (2009)). We introduce individual demand uncertainty into Hotelling's model of horizontal product differentiation...

Financial protection is claimed to be an important objective of health policy. Yet there is a lack of clarity about what it is and no consensus on how to measure it. I address the ambiguity of meaning by considering three questions: Protection of what? Protection against what? Protection with...

This paper studies the internal organizational design of politicalinstitutions in presence of lobbying. We consider a legislature ascomposed of two bodies: the floor and an informational committee. Thefloor has the (formal) power to choose the policy to be implemented.The policy outcome is ex...

In this paper we analyze a large sample of individual responses to six lottery questions. Wederive a simultaneous estimate of risk aversion ? and the time preference discount rate ? perindividual. This can be done because the consumption of a large prize is smoothed over a largertime period. It...