When companies purchase IT products for their employees, departments or divisions, whether to standardize on one product or to allow the users to make their own choices is an important decision for IT managers to make. By consolidating demand and committing to buy from a single seller,...

This Article considers the advantages and disadvantages of market-based program design, natural gas regulation, and enhanced international understanding. Transitioning to a green economy involves dedicating efforts towards environmentally sound energy innovation. RGGI, natural gas, and climate...

The paper presents a simulation of the dynamics of impersonal trust. It shows how a 'trust/reciprocation' norm can emerge and stabilize in populations of conditional cooperators. The norm, or behavioral regularity, is not to be identified with a single strategy. It is instead supported by...

We analyze a class of proportional cake-cutting algorithms that use a minimal number of cuts (n-1 if there are n players) to divide a cake that the players value along one dimension. While these algorithms may not produce an envy-free or efficient allocation – as these terms are used in the...

This is an Invited paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and "standard" economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can provide useful arguments and insights in a...

The policy recommendations of most economists are based on the rational actor model of human behavior. Behavior is assumed to be self-regarding, preferences are assumed to be stable, and decisions are assumed to be unaffected by social context or frame of reference. The related fields of...

This paper, prepared for the Handbook of Income Distribution (edited by A.B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon), reviews some of the central issues that arise in thinking about the motives for, politics of, constraints on and measurement of, redistribution. Amongst the themes are: the potential...