In many markets, firms make their products complex through add-on features, thus making them difficult to evaluate and compare. Does this product obfuscation lure buyers into buying overpriced products, and if so, why does competition not eliminate this practice? More generally, under which...

We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirically...

Are initial competitive advantages self-reinforcing, so that markets exhibit an endogenous tendency to be dominated by only a few firms? Although this question is of great economic importance, no systematic empirical study has yet addressed it. Therefore, we examine experimentally whether firms...

Previous experimental work provides encouraging support for some of the central assumptions underlying Hart and Moore (2008)'s theory of contractual reference points. However, existing studies ignore realistic aspects of trading relationships such as informal agreements and expost renegotiation....

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

We develop the theory of demand for commodities and assets facing incompletely insurable uncertainty. First, a Slutsky matrix decomposes into substitution and income effects the derivative of demand with respect to prices and yield structure. Next, we identify the Slutsky matrix’s properties....

Financial innovation in an existing asset generically supports a Pareto improvement, targeting the income effect. This result, as several on taxation, owes to one unifying notion: that an intervention generically supports Pareto improvements if the implied price adjustment is sufficiently...

It is known that the incompleteness of asset markets causes inefficiency in almost every equilibrium. Yet unexplored is the ”size” of this inefficiency. The size of a Pareto improvement is the total willingness to pay for it, out of current consumption. Inefficiency is the maximum size of...

Focusing on tax policy with incomplete asset markets, we create a framework for proving the existence of Pareto improving taxes, for computing them, and for bounding the improvement. The protagonist is the price adjustment following an intervention. If the price adjustment is sufficiently...

We show that for generic economies, every equilibrium admits Pareto improving monetary policy, even with multiple commodities per state. The main assumption is that asset incompleteness be intermediate, in that household heterogeneity does not exceed the number of assets present and absent. We...