We analyze the impact of social comparison on optimal contract design under imperfect labor market competition for managerial talent. Adding a disutility of social comparison as induced by a ranking of verifiable efforts to the multi-task model by Bénabou and Tirole (2016), we demonstrate that...

The psychology literature provides ample evidence that people have difficulties taking the perspective of less-informed others. This paper presents a controlled experiment showing that this "curse of knowledge" can cause comparative overconfidence and overentry into competition. In a broader...

In this experiment I study a novel three-player ultimatum game in which two proposers with unequal amounts of money simultaneously submit offers to one responder, who may accept at most one offer. I compare the predictions of inequity aversion, advantage seeking, and self-interest. Unlike...

I construct an efficient game of competition for insurance markets with adverse selection. In the game, each company offers two menus of contracts: a public menu and a private menu. The union of all the public menus needs to be offered by every active company in the market. A private menu...

The process of innovation is driven by two main factors: new inventions and institutions supporting the transformation of inventions into marketable innovations. This paper proposes a new institution, called a semi-public competition, that has been neglected by the economic literature but exists...

The relationship between technical progress and price competition is a controversial issue in economics. This paper highlights the fact that investment in technical progress is an authentic type of competition which benefits the consumers rather than the industry. This type of competition exists...

This paper investigates the incentives to invest in improving the quality (as distinguished to investment in a new activity) in telecommunication industry using the empirical example of wireless markets. We highlight that investment incentives are positively related to the potential for...

This paper investigates the impact of technical progress on the relationship between competition an investment. Using a model of oligopoly competition with differentiated products where firms invest to reduce their marginal cost of production, I find that technical progress, which increases the...

The cyclicality of markups is crucial to understanding the propagation of shocks and the size of multipliers. I show that the degree of inertia in the response of output to shocks can reverse the cyclicality of markups within implicit collusion and customer-base models. In both classes of...