Recent evidence suggests that despite opening up a country for trade, the productivity gap between developed and emerging economies often does not close. This paper examines credit constraints as one channel held responsible for hampering convergence. Specifically, we extend a Melitz and...

This paper identifies a new reason for giving preferences to the disadvantaged using a model of contests. There are two forces at work: the effort effect working against giving preferences and the selection effect working for them. When education is costly and easy to obtain (as in the U.S.),...

Colluding firms often exchange private information and make transfers within the cartels based on the information. Estimating the impact of such collusive practices'€" known as the 'lysine strategy profile (LSP)€'€" on cartel duration is difficult because of endogeneity and omitted...

The literature on R&D contests implicitly assumes that contestants submit their innovation regardless of its value. This ignores a potential adverse selection problem. The present paper analyzes the procurement of innovations when the procurer cannot commit to never bargain with innovators who...

We show that incompetitive careers based on individual performance the least productive individuals may have the highest probabilities to be promoted to top positions. These individuals have the lowest fall-back positions and, hence, the highest incentives to succeed in career contests. This...

We consider a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests with privately informed players. We show that findings by Athey (2001) imply the existence of a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in monotone pure strategies.

Consider a differentiated product market in which all consumers are fully informed about match value and price at the time they make their purchasing decision. Initially, consumers become informed about the prices of all products in the market but do not know the match values. Some consumers...

We study the potential of cooperation in global emission abatements with multiple externalities. Using a two-country model without side-payments, we identify the strategic effects under different timing regimes of cooperation. We obtain a positive complementarity effect of long-term cooperation...

This note relates the mechanisms that are based on mediated contracts of Rahman and Obara (2010) to the mechanisms of Myerson (1982). It shows that the mechanisms in Myerson (1982) are more general in that they encompass the mechanisms based on mediated contracts. It establishes an equivalence...