We report results from a sender-receiver cheap talk game, which explores whether an individual's decision to deceive is influenced by a concern for relative standing in a reference group. We show theoretically that positively biased senders, who think they are higher in the deception...

A committee is choosing from two alternatives. If required supermajority is not reached, voting is repeated indefinitely, although there is a cost of delay. Under suitable assumptions the equilibrium analysis provides a sharp prediction. The result can be interpreted as a generalization of the...

Simple majority does not reflect the intensity of voters’ preferences. This paper presents an efficient collective choice mechanism when the choice is binary and the designer may use non-trasferable punishments to persuade agents to reveal their private information. The designer faces a...

This paper apportions responsability for inefficency in a market for state contingent claims between market makers and traders. We specifically examine the origins of a frequently observed distortion in the market for bets in horseraces- the favorite- longshot bias. Previous studies rationalise...

This paper reviews the application of OR to financial markets. After considering reasons for the attractiveness of general finance problems to Or researchers, the main types of financial market problem amenable to OR are identified, and some of the many problems solved using OR are documented.

A constraint satisfaction problem requires a value, selected from a given finite domain, to be assigned to each variable in the problem, so that all constraints relating the variables are satisfied. Many combinatorial problems in operational research, such as schedulling and timetabling, can be...

Empirical research on group lending is extensive, but without allowance for collateral to mitigate strategic default. Indeed, lack of credit access has motivated microcredit in rural areas of developing countries, where agents with collateral are very rare. As rural communities have tight-knit...

In a global context foreign direct investment (FDI) and migration substitute one another in the matching process between workers and firms. However, as labor flows can lead to the formation of business networks, migration can actually facilitate FDI in the long-run. We first present a stylized...

Estimates for the U.S. suggest that in some sectors productivity enhancing reallocation is the dominant factor in accounting for productivity growth. An open question is whether reallocation is always productivity enhancing. Specifically, in developing countries, market concentration, or...