We set up a sequential merger game to study a firm's incentives to pass up on an opportunity to merge with another firm. We find that such incentives may exist when there are efficiency gains from a merger, firms are of different sizes, there is an antitrust authority present to approve mergers,...

Many types of economic and social activities involve significant behavioral complementarities (peer effects) with neighbors in the social network. The same activities often exert externalities that cumulate in stocks affecting agents' welfare and incentives. For instance, smoking is subject to...

The paper studies the impact of ethnic diversity on social participation of young people. We first propose a theoretical model in which the agents choose between structured and unstructured social activities by taking into account the ethnic composition of the groups they join. We test our...

In this paper, we discuss how fraud liability regimes impact the price structure that is chosen by a monopolistic payment platform, in a setting where merchants can invest in fraud detection technologies. We show that liability allocation rules distort the price structure charged by platforms or...

The transition of a sector from a pollutant state to a clean one is studied. A green technology, subject to learning-by-doing, progressively replaces an old one. The notion of abatement cost in this dynamic context is fully characterized. The theoretical, dynamic optimization, perspective is...