This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences ("values"), material or other explicit incentives ("laws") and social sanctions or rewards ("norms"). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals'...

This paper analyzes the impact of labor market competition and skill-biased technical change on the structure of compensation. The model combines multitasking and screening, embedded into a Hotelling-like framework. Competition for the most talented workers leads to an escalating reliance on...

What is the best way to reward innovation? While prizes avoid deadweight loss, intellectual property selects high social surplus projects. Optimal innovation policy thus trades off the ex-ante screening benefit and the ex-post distortion. It solves a multidimensional screening problem in the...