We estimate peer effects in college achievement using a data set in which individuals are exogenously assigned to peer groups of about 30 students with whom they are required to spend the majority of their time interacting. This feature enables us to estimate peer effects that are more...

This article explores theoretical and experimental implications of using auctions to reward winners of research tournaments. This process is a hybrid of the research tournament for a prize and a first-price auction held after the research is complete. The bids in the auction consist of a vector...

To estimate peer effects in college achievement we exploit a unique dataset in which individuals have been exogenously assigned to peer groups of about 30 students with whom they are required to spend the majority of their time interacting. This feature enables us to estimate peer effects that...

Given an externality function that implements a social objective, this paper examines the possibility of implementing the social objective when the action is observed with error. Provided that the signal is informative in the sense that it separates certain distributions of actions and agents...

We study a one-dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have "character" and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. Character is desirable, and a voter's utility is a convex...

When a downstream firm buys an input supplier, it can reduce its costs of using that input. Other input suppliers typically respond by pricing more aggressively, given the demand reduction, which tends to lower input supply costs to other firms. Thus, a vertical merger may lower rivals' costs...

Companies with market power occasionally engage in intentional quality reduction of a portion of their output as a means of offering two qualities of goods for the purpose of price discrimination, even absent a cost saving. This paper provides an exact characterization in terms of marginal...