Define the riskiness of a gamble as the reciprocal of the absolute risk aversion (ARA) of an individual with constant ARA who is indifferent between taking and not taking that gamble. We characterize this index by axioms, chief among them a “duality” axiom which, roughly speaking, asserts...

This paper analyzes one-good exchange economies with two infinitely-lived agents and incomplete markets. It is shown that there are no recursive (Markov) equilibria for which borrowing (debt) constraints never bind if the state space of exogenous and endogenous variables is a compact subset of...

In contrast to the existing literature on repeated games that assumes a Þxed discount factor, I study an environment in which it is more realistic to assume a ßuctuating discount factor. In a repeated oligopoly, as the interest rate changes, so too does the degree to which Þrms discount the...

An appropriate (interim) notion of the core for an economy with incomplete information depends on the amount of information that coalitions can share. The coarse and fine core, as originally defined by Wilson (1978), correspond to two polar cases, involving no information sharing and arbitrary...

We view achieving a particular correlated equilibrium distribution for a normal form game as an implementation problem. We show, using a parametric version of the two-person Chicken game and a wide class of correlated equilibrium distributions, that a social choice function that chooses a...

In a public goods experiment with the opportunity to vote to expel members of a group, we found that contributions rose to nearly 100% of endowments with significantly higher efficiency compared with a noexpulsion baseline. Expulsions were strictly of the lowest contributors, and there was an...

We find a limited parallel between lump-sum taxes and environmental taxes. Corollary 2, which extends Sandmo’s observation, shows that appropriated corrective revenues have the same non-distortionary effects as lump-sum taxes, the result reducing to the original observation when the...

This paper analyzes a class of stochastic endogenous growth models with uninsurable idiosyncratic income risk. The model economy is populated by infinitely-lived households who own and operate their own business, work for a stock company, and participate in stock and bond markets. Households...

Previous experiments on public goods dilemmas have found that the opportunity to punish leads to higher contributions and reduces the free rider problem; however, a substantial amount of punishment is targeted on high contributors. In the experiment reported here, subjects are given the...