I present a brief classroom demonstration illustrating Bertrand price undercutting. The classroom demonstration is appropriate for Micro Principles, and both intermediate and upper level undergraduate, as well as graduate classes in micro, Industrial Organization, and Game Theory

We propose a computational model to study (the evolution of) post-secondary education. “Consumers” who differ in quality shop around for desirable colleges or universities. “Firms” that differ in quality signal the availability of their services to desirable students. As long as they...

In this paper we address an asymmetric information problem in the fundraising industry, the fundraising problem. The problem arises from donors' lack of information about the quality of charities that solicit donations. We focus on one particular solution of this problem, certification, where an...

We analyze tournaments of heterogeneous players from an organizer's perspective. Using a simple model of a noisy tournament, we demonstrate how the likelihood of selecting the best player, here termed the "predictive power" of a tournament, depends on the tournament format, the distribution of...

Theory and empirics suggest that by curbing competition, incumbent electricity companies which used to be and here are referred to as Vertically Integrated Utilities (VIUs), can increase their profitability through combined ownership of generation and transmission and/or distribution networks....

In a series of articles and manuscripts (e.g., Kruger & Dunning, 1999, Dunning et al., 2003, Ehrlinger et al., 2005), Dunning, Kruger and their collaborators argued that the unskilled lack the metacognitive ability to realize their incompetence. We propose that the unskilled-and-unaware problem...

We provide a game-theoretic model of academic organizations, focusing on the strategic interaction of prototypical overseers, administrators, and professors. By identifying key principal-agent games routinely played in colleges and universities, we begin to unpack the black box typically used to...

Are communication failures common? We revisit classic examples of coordination failure and explore experimentally, in a 2x2 design, the effects of deviation costs and loss aversion. Our results add to our understanding of how to engineer coordination successes in the laboratory

Coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria have attracted major theoretical attention over the past two decades. Two early path-breaking sets of experimental studies were widely interpreted as suggesting that coordination failure is a common phenomenon in the laboratory. We identify the...

Draft of a contribution to Kincaid & Ross Modern Guide to Philosophy of Economics (Elgar). To talk in 2020 about the foundations of behavioural and experimental economics (BE and EE from here on), or for that matter the methodological and substantive relationships between economic and...