China's infant crop insurance industry faces two, not mutually exclusive, challenges. The first challenge is operational and arises from the lack of historical crop yield data at the farm household or village level. The second problem relates to a possible disconnect between objective measures...

In Balabdaoui, Rufibach, and Wellner (2009), pointwise asymptotic theory was developed for the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator of a log-concave density. Here, the practical aspects of their results are explored. Namely, the theory is used to develop pointwise confidence intervals for...

When a number of TEMs (thermoelectric modules) are connected in a series–parallel matrix and under mismatched temperature gradients, the overall maximum output power of the thermoelectric generator (TEG) may be lowered by certain TEMs with relatively smaller temperature difference. It is...

We show that, in environments with independent private values and transferable utility, a privately informed principal can solve her mechanism selection problem by implementing an allocation that is ex-ante optimal for her. No type of the principal can gain from proposing an alternative...

We provide a solution to the informed-principal problem in the independent private values setting with monetary transfers. The principal's private information creates signaling considerations that may distort the implemented allocation. We show that there is no distortion: all principal types...

In standard auctions resale creates a role for a speculator-a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. We study this issue in environments with symmetric independent private-value bidders. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding...