Arrow's original proof of his impossibility theorem proceeded in two steps: showing the existence of a decisive voter, and then showing that a decisive voter is a dictator. Barbera replaced the decisive voter with the weaker notion of a pivotal voter, thereby shortening the first step, but...

We show that if students care primarily about their status (relative rank) in class, they are best motivated to work not by revealing their exact numerical exam scores (100,99,...,1), but instead by clumping them in broad categories (A,B,C). If their abilities are disparate, the optimal grading...

Our purpose in this paper is to investigate the economics of managerial organizations by focusing on the decision problem of management. Ours is a "team theory" analysis, that is, it ignores the problem of conflicting objectives among managers and focuses instead on the problem of coordinating...

We prove the existence of monetary equilibrium in a finite horizon economy with production. We also show that if agents expect the monetary authority to significantly decrease the supply of bank money available for short term loans in the future, then the economy will fall into a liquidity trap...

We build a finite horizon model with inside and outside money, in which interest rates, price levels and commodity allocations are determinate, even though asset markets are incomplete and asset deliveries are purely nominal.

In this paper we propose a pseudo-Nash equilibrium for N-person games in which very simply we allow play in the last period to be arbitrary, but otherwise it must conform to the (perfect) Nash optimality criterion.

We recast the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) in the broader context of general equilibrium with incomplete markets (GEI). In this setting we give proofs of three properties of CAPM equilibria: they are efficient, asset prices lie on a "security market line," and all agents hold the same two...

This study is an effort to give a simple measure of the local size of the equilibrium set of OLG economies in which there may be more than one good and more than one consumer per period, and in which the generations may differ across time.

We show that if agents are risk neutral, prizes outperform wages when there is sufficient pride and envy relative to the noisiness of performance. If agents are risk averse, prizes are a necessary supplement to wages (as bonuses).