In recent years several countries have started massive highway franchising programs auctioned to private firms. In these auctions, the regulator typically sets the franchise term and firms bid on tolls, or, alternatively, the regulator sets tolls and the winner is the firm that asks for the...

We present an empirical test for the addictiveness of lottery gambling. To distinguish state dependence from serial correlation, we exploit an exogenous shock to local market consumption of lottery gambling. We use the sale of a winning ticket in the zip code, the location of which is random...

This paper studies redistribution by means of a public supply of medical treatment. We show that the government can redistribute income towards low-ability individuals in a world of asymmetric information by offering bundles of medical treatment and redistributive payment. If self-selection is a...

Economic evaluation of projects involving changes in mortality risk conventionally assumes that lives are statistical, i.e., that risks and policy-induced changes in risk are small and similar among a population. In reality, baseline mortality risks and policy-induced changes in risk often...

Economists studying collective decision problems often consider how a social planner would behave. The standard exercise presumes complete knowledge of the welfare achieved by each feasible policy. However, we often have only partial knowledge of policy impacts. This paper extends my program of...

Economists studying choice with partial knowledge typically assume that the decision maker places a subjective distribution on unknown quantities and maximizes expected utility. Someone lacking a subjective distribution faces a problem of choice under ambiguity. This article reviews recent...

Invoking Yaari's dual theory we develop a model of individual vaccination decisions that incorporates quasi-hyperbolic discounting (present-biasedness), risk aversion, and information. We test the resulting hypotheses for the flu season 2010/2011 using a representative German data set. It turns...

The study at hand deals with the expectations of professional analysts and novices in the context of foreign exchange markets. We analyze the respective forecasting accuracy and our results indicate that there exist substantial differences between professional forecasts and judgmental forecasts...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat naïve random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient...