We use perturbation analysis to study independent private-value all-pay auctions with weakly risk-averse buyers. We show that under weak risk aversion: 1) Buyers with low values bid lower and buyers with high values bid higher than they would bid in the risk neutral case. 2) Buyers with low...

We study an elimination tournament with heterogenous contestants whose ability is common-knowledge. Each pair-wise match is modeled as an all-pay auction where the winner gets the right to compete at the next round. Equilibrium efforts are in mixed strategies, yielding rather complex play...

We study two-sided markets with a finite numbers of agents on each side, and with two-sided incomplete information. Agents are matched assortatively on the basis of costly signals. A main goal is to identify conditions under which the potential increase in expected output due to assortative...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious definition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to influence the agents' performance. We first consider a pure status case where there...

In this paper we examine whether absorptive capacity can constitute sufficient justification for rejecting the proposal of a large aid increase to support the ‘big push’. We argue that the probability of a poverty trap exists for many countries, in particular the least developed countries...

This paper analyzes econometrically how a country`s post-crisis debt ratio could be forecast, in the aftermath of a debt crisis, from the previous debt-to-GDP ratio. A critical parameter is simply the debt-to-PPP-GDP ratio, where PPP-GDP is, in current international dollars, the Summers-Heston...