Descending price auctions are adopted for goods that must be sold quickly and in private values environments, for instance in flower, fish, and tobacco auctions. In this paper, we introduce ex post efficient descending auctions for two environments: multiple non-identical items and buyers with...

We identify a new route through which patent protection may affect R&D incentives, the tournament effect. It may decrease R\&D incentives, in which case patent protection may either adversely affect the level of R&D, or may discourage licensing. In either case welfare may fall.

This paper surveys the evolutionary game theoretic literature on reciprocity in human interactions, dealing both with long-term relationships and with sporadic interactions. Four basic themes, repetition, commitment, assortation, and parochialism, appear repeatedly throughout the literature....

A randomly selected treatment group of households in Gurgaon, India was informed whether (or not) their drinking water had tested positive for fecal contamination using a simple test costing about $0.50. Households that were not initially purifying their water, and were told that their drinking...

Very poor households may be excluded from public programs intended for their benefit for a variety of reasons as lack information, a permanent residence or membershiip in social networks. We are interested in methods of testing for such exclusion based on independently drawn samples of program...

The ratio of Indian to US per capita output over the past 45 years has displayed a distinctive "V"-shaped pattern. We show that a strikingly similar V-shaped pattern is visible not just in aggregate output figures, but also as the primary determinant of long-term movements in the cross-sectional...

Much of economics is built on the assumption of individuals being driven by self-interest and economic development as an outcome of the free play of such individuals. On the few occasions that economics recognizes the role of altruism and trust, the tendency is to build these from the axiom of...

This paper analyzes the formation of networks when players choose how much to invest in each relationship. We suppose that players have a fixed endowment that they can allocate across links, and in the baseline model, suppose that link strength is an additively separable and convex function of...

This paper constructs a heterogenous agent model of endogenous distribution and growth. When the labor leisure choice of agents is exogenous, the factor holding ratios of households converges to a mass point that is independent of the initial distribution of capital in the steady state. There is...

This paper examines how public goods get allocated by a centralized state. We use data on social structure and public goods in rural India over the sixties, seventies and eighties to examine the influence of particular social groups, and of social and economic heterogeneity more generally, on...