Mobile telecommunications has been a considerable success with consumers, yet markets are oligopolies designed by governments and by industry, with many flaws, including limited ability to regulate prices, quality of service and coverage. Markets have been partially opened to competition, with...

I compare certification and self-regulation, two widely used quality assurance mechanisms in markets where consumers do not observe the quality of goods. Certification is a mechanism in which an external firm oers a certificate to producers who undergo a testing procedure, issues the certificate...

This paper studies a large class of imperfectly discriminating contests, referred to as elastic contests, that induce players to either overbid a standing bid or to abstain from bidding altogether. Many common forms of contest are elastic. In any equilibrium of an elastic contest, there is...

This paper considers rent-seeking games in which a small percentage change in a player's bid has a large percentage impact on her odds of winning, i.e., on the ratio of her respective probabilities of winning and losing. An example is the Tullock contest with a high R. The analysis provides a...

Voter turnout is frequently cited as gauging a polity's health. The ease with which electoral members can produce political support, however, can retard an economy's productive capacity. For example, while mobile electorates might efficaciously monitor political agents, they may also lack...

We propose an allocation mechanism for publicly providing a private good such that the final allocation is simultaneously independent of income and increasing in strength of preference or need. The "pay or wait" mechanism consists of offering the good for sale at two outlets. The 'queuing'...

Immigration today presents two distinct but related problems. The first, and most neglected, relates to the money supply and currency values: due to the global availability of Western Union and Moneygram, remittances to home countries have exploded in the last decade, with estimates running into...

In this paper, we study gains and losses that accrue to natives because of immigration. The gain on the aggregated level is called the ?immigration surplus?, which can be seen as analogous to a consumer surplus. We derive changes in the earnings of native owners of production factors by...