We develop an approach to providing epistemic conditions for admissible behavior in games. Instead of using lexicographic beliefs to capture infinitely less likely conjectures, we postulate that players use tie-breaking sets to help decide among strategies that are outcome-equivalent given their...

In the context of a simple model of public good provision, we study the requirement on an allocation rule that it be immune to manipulation by augmenting one's endowment through borrowing from the outside world. We call it open-economy borrowing-proofness (Thomson, 2009). We ask whether the...

Many cases of successful economic development, such as South Korea, exhibit long periods of sustained capital accumulation rates. This empirical feature is at odds with the standard neoclassical growth model which predicts initially high and then declining capital accumulation rates. We show...

In standard models of experimentation, the costs of project development consist of (i) the direct cost of running trials as well as (ii) the implicit opportunity cost of leaving alternative projects idle. Another natural type of experimentation cost, the cost of holding on to the option of...

We compute the welfare cost of egalitarianism - a tax policy that equalizes wages for all. The benchmark "laissez-faire" economy has features a la Aiyagari (1994) with endogenous labor supply. A progressive income tax provides insurance against income risks but at the cost of efficiency: it...

We use a residual-based bootstrap method to re-examine the finding of the Granger causality relationship from exchange rates to fundamentals in Engel and West (Exchange rate and fundamentals, Journal of Political Economy 2005, 113 (3), 485–517), in which the evidence for the relation is taken...

This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a pure strategy Bertrand equilibrium in a model of price competition with fixed costs. It unveils an interesting and unexplored relationship between Bertrand competition and natural monopoly. That relationship points...

This note investigates the noncooperative foundations of von Neumann-Morgenstern (vN-M) stable sets in voting games. To do so, we study subgame perfect equilibria of a noncooperative legislative bargaining game, based on underlying simple games. The following results emerge from such an...