This paper considers the role of social networks in the non-market valuation of public goods. In the model individuals derive utility both from their own direct enjoyment of the public good and from the enjoyment of those in their network. We find that network structure almost always matters,...

This paper assesses the technical efficiency (TE) of the infrastructure of sixty-three major airports in Brazil. We use the order-m approach in which airports are benchmarked against an expected minimum input frontier. Despite being a non-parametric estimator, the order-m is robust to noise in...

Rural households in developing countries adopt diversification of income sources as a common strategy to stabilize their income throughout the year. We view social networks as an important factor that influences diversification activities. Social interactions may help households to gain ideas,...

Health insurance expansions may increase the demand for care-creating incentives for health systems to increase input consumption. The possibility remains that added capacity and personnel will have little effect on health outcomes, decreasing the technical efficiency of health care delivery...

This paper presents a model in which a technically inefficient firm is responsible for the emissions of pollutants. We derive second-best regulatory schemes (tax and quota) assuming that the firm’s technical efficiency is unknown to the regulator.

This paper considers the applicability of the standard separability axiom for both risk and other-regarding preferences, and advances arguments why separability might fail. An alternative axiom, which is immune to these arguments, leads to a preference representation that is additively separable...

If its utility function is everywhere increasing and concave, rank-dependent expected utility shares a troubling property with expected utility aversion to the same moderate-stakes risk at every wealth level implies an extreme aversion to large-stakes risks. In fact, the problem may be even...

We consider a situation in which games are formed endogenously in two senses: (1) there is a pregame in which agents choose to learn a subset of all feasible strategies and can then employ only these strategies in subsequent play, and (2) agents choose their game partners through a costly search...

Most studies of homework effectiveness relate time spent on homework to test performance, and find a nonmonotonic relationship. A theoretical model shows that this can occur even when additional homework helps all students because of the way in which variables are defined. However, some students...

This paper contributes to the widespread discussion of the sources of the divergence between WTA and WTP values. The paper reports on theoretical and empirical investigations which show that value and outcome uncertainty offer an explanation for this disparity. Given a set of hypotheses...