The probability of income loss depends on talent and effort. Effort has positive externalities and therefore individuals are proportion to their perceived diligence. The social norm requires more effort from individuals perceived as more talented, but talent is private information and...

We thank three anonymous referees for thoughtful comments and suggestions which we found very constructive and helpful. We are particularly grateful to the editor, Al Klevorick, for his advice and painstaking guidance through the multiple revision process. We thank Robert Barsky, Susanto Basu,...

We offer the first direct evidence of an implicit contract in a goods market. The evidence we offer comes from the market for Coca-Cola. We demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company left a substantial amount of written evidence of its implicit contract with its consumers-a very explicit form of an...

We study the cost of breaching an implicit contract in a goods market, building on a recent study that documented the presence of such a contract in the Coca-Cola market, in the US, during 1886-1959. The implicit contract promised a serving of Coca-Cola of a constant quality (the "real thing"),...

When looked at individually there is little reason to think that economists lack integrity and are dishonest. Yet, when we look at academic papers written by economists we can see biases. This paper tries to reconcile these two observations by arguing that the constraints the profession sets on...

We offer the first direct evidence of an implicit contract in a goods market. The evidence we offer comes from the market for Coca-Cola. We demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company left a substantial amount of written evidence of its implicit contract with its consumers—a very explicit form of...

Economic organization of the imaginary worlds depicted in popular literary works may be viewed as a mirror to public opinion on the economic organization of life. If a book becomes a best-seller, it is because the book conveys messages, feelings, and events the readers can relate to. In other...

This paper uses individuals' self-assessments of their contribution to four household activities to study how mixed-gender couples divide household responsibility. Household responsibility dynamics are characterized according to a three-point ordinal variable, whose distribution is linked to a...

We study the long-run stability of trade networks in a two-sided economy of agents labelled men and women. Each agent desires relationships with the other type, but having multiple partners is costly. This cost-benefit trade-off results in each agent having a single-peaked utility over the...

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience find that fictional works exert strong influence on readers and shape their opinions and worldviews. We study the Potterian economy, which we compare to economic models, to assess how Harry Potter books affect economic literacy. We find that some...