Empirical evidence suggests that the distribution of earnings reports is discontinuous. This is puzzling since the distribution of true earnings is likely to be continuous. We present a model that rationalizes this phenomenon. In our model, managers report their earnings to rational investors,...

Nectar yields (standing crops) in flowers within an individual plant are often highly variable. This variability may be a by-product of the foraging activity of insect pollinators. Alternatively, plants may be selected to produce highly variable rewards to reduce consecutive visitation by...

We examine incentive-compatible mechanisms for fair financing and efficient selection of a public budget (or public good). A mechanism selects the level of the public budget and imposes taxes on individuals. Individuals’ preferences are quasilinear. Fairness is expressed as weak monotonicity...

Hebrew University of Jerusalem students participated in two experiments of repeated play of the Intergroup Prisoners' Dilemma (IPD) game, which involves conflict of interests between two groups and, simultaneously, within each group. The experiments manipulated the level of competition exhibited...

The paper analyzes an economy with asymmetric information in which agents trade in contingent assets. The new feature in the model is that each agent may have any prior belief on the states of nature and thus the posterior belief of an agent maybe any probability distribution that is consistent...

Why do brokers charge per-share commissions to institutional traders? What determines the commission charge? We examine commissions and order flow for a sample of institutional orders and find that most per-share commissions are concentrated at only a few price points, primarily 5 and 6 cents...

In many tournaments investments are made over time and conducting a review only once at the end, or also at points midway through, is a strategic decision of the tournament designer. If the latter is chosen, then a rule according to which the results of the different reviews are aggregated into...

This document contains four separate analyses, each with a different author, of the "Gans" committee report on the Bible codes (DP 364 of the Center for the Study of Rationality, June 2004). The analyses appear in alphabetical order of the authors' names. Three of the authors were members of the...

The Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem asserts the impossibility of designing a non-dictatorial voting rule in which truth-telling always constitutes a Nash equilibrium. We show that in voting games of complete information where a mediator is on hand, this troubling impossibility result can be...

The parental investment conflict considers the question of how much each sex should invest in each brood, thereby characterizing different animal groups. Each such group usually adopts a certain parental care pattern: female-care only, male-care only, biparental care, or even no parental care at...