The present paper, following the philosophical work of Robert Nozick, intends to develop the approach of simplicity in the economic investigation. This purpose contributes to structure a heuristic for projects of investigation that can serve like mark of discussion of grade projects in the...

We address the problem of optimal allocation of non-divisible resource bundles to a set of interconnected contests. For this purpose, we study a modification of the Colonel Blotto Game called the Tennis Coach Problem. We devise a thoroughly probabilistic method of payoff representation and fully...

The game Prisoner's Dilemma provides a helpful tool for understanding international tax competition. Nations would be best served by cooperating with each other to keep corporate income tax rates high. But fearing defection by other nations, many nations often unilaterally lower their corporate...

From a financial economic perspective, the governing condition of a meritorious civil action is the uncertainty of outcome. Expectation and outcome deviate, and the spread is the measure of uncertainty (or variance). During litigation each party has an option to settle or select trial. The...

The Bali Roadmap marks a milestone in the process of international consensus building, setting forth a multilateral legal framework to address climate change. Delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali (Dec. 3-15 2007) launched a two-year process with a comprehensive agenda and 2009...

This paper investigates equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric competitions with unconditional and conditional investments. Such competitions include lobbying settings, labor-market tournaments, and Ramp;D races, among others. I provide an algorithm that constructs the...

This article surveys the theoretical literature on legislative bargaining with endogenous status-quo. These are the legislative bargaining situations in which in each period a new policy is decided and the policy implemented in the event of no agreement is endogenously determined by the outcome...

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

We analyse incentive problems in team and partnership structures where the only available information to condition a contract on is some noisy ranking of the partners' efforts. This enables us to ensure both first best efficient effort levels for all partners and the redistribution of output...

This article surveys the theoretical literature on legislative bargaining with endogenous status-quo. These are the legislative bargaining situations in which in each period a new policy is decided and the policy implemented in the event of no agreement is endogenously determined by the outcome...