In recent years bonuses tied to performance have become commonplace in banks and other financial institutions; indeed they now constitute a major part of employee compensation.  The practice was originally justified by academic work on principal-agent contracts, which argued that performance...

In this paper, we develop an economic rationale for the following stylized fact: Web-based firms spend profligately on advertising and marketing and usually lose money. Our rationale is based on the winner-take-all structure of high fixed cost, low marginal cost, markets for information goods....

Electricity market design in the United States is increasingly dominated by locational marginal pricing (LMP) of energy and transmission. LMP markets are typically coupled with periodic auctions of financial transmission rights (FTRs) to hedge transmission price risks. While LMP designs offer...

In an asymmetric information framework, a number of authors have demonstrated the existence and uniqueness of short-term debt pooling equilibria in the absence of dissipative costs. The authors show that short-term debt pooling is robust to a broad range of deviations from stationarity and...

In uniform-price auctions of shares there exist collusive equilibria in which bidders capture the entire surplus from the auction as well as competitive equilibria in which the auctioneer captures the entire surplus from the auction. We provide experimental evidence that, in uniform-price...

Land subsidence, a major geological hazard in Tianjin, has caused serious losses. In this research, we established a numerical model to predict potential land subsidence caused by groundwater overdraft in the next decades. The model set three groundwater extraction scenarios, corresponding to...

Based on daily, monthly, seasonal and annual precipitation, monthly duration and flood-affected area data from 1954 to 2007, we examined the absolute and relative change trends of rainfall and their effects on hazard intensity in Wenzhou city, China. The long-term trend of precipitation was...

Huangpu River floodplain is historically vulnerable to flooding due to its location in the path of tropical cyclones, low elevation, relatively flat topography, rapid changes in sea level and fast rate of land subsidence due to urbanization. This paper presents a scenario-based study that...

Based on the analysis and calculation of the hazard intensity of typhoon rainstorms and floods as well as the vulnerability of flood receptors and the possibility of great losses, risk scenarios are proposed and presented in Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province, China, using the Pearson-III model and...