Timing is crucial in situations ranging from currency attacks, to product introductions, to starting a revolution. These settings share the feature that payoffs depend critically on the timing of a few other key players—and their moves are uncertain. To capture this, we introduce the...

What is the New Economy, what makes it new, and what are the implications for antitrust, regulation and macroeconomic policy? Providing a non-technical and compelling analysis of the modern macro-economy, the contributors to this volume, eminent scholars all, provide their views on the New...

Levitt and List (2007) hypothesize that pro-social individuals will be selected out of cutthroat industries. To study this, we measure the pro-social preferences of individuals in two such industries, domain trading and online adult entertainment (pornography). Contrary to the selection...

type="main" <p>A firm surveys a large number of consumers, some of whom sincerely report their tastes and others of whom report strategically. It makes product decisions using the sample mean of survey responses. When firms and consumers agree on the fraction of sincere consumers, information loss...</p>

We report the results of laboratory experiments on rent-seeking contests with endogenous participation. Theory predicts that (a) contest entry and rent-seeking expenditures increase with the size of the prize and (b) earnings are equalized between the contest and the outside option. While the...

We report the results of laboratory experiments on rent-seeking contests with endogenous participation. Theory predicts that (a) contest entry and rent-seeking expenditures increase with the size of the prize; and (b) earnings are equalized between the contest and the outside option. While the...

We model an environment where e-retailers sell similar products and endogenously engage in both brand advertising (to create loyal customers) and price advertising (to attract "shoppers"). In contrast to models where loyalty is exogenous, endogenizing the creation of loyal customers by allowing...

Increasingly, lobbying groups are subject to transparency requirements, obliging them to provide detailed information about their business. We study the effect this transparency policy has on the nature of lobbying competition. Under mild conditions, mandated transparency leads to an increase in...

We offer a model of "negative vote buying"--paying voters to abstain. Although negative vote buying is feasible under the open ballot, it is never optimal. In contrast, a combination of positive and negative vote buying is optimal under the secret ballot: Lukewarm supporters are paid to show up...

Sufficient conditions are found for designs, derived from completely symmetric designs by deleting binary blocks, to be E-optimal. Sufficient conditions are also found for E-optimality of designs obtained from other E-optimal designs by deleting all blocks forming a balanced incomplete block...