When studying consumption choices, economists have often relied on the abstraction of a representative agent. Such an agent can indeed be shown to exist and to replicate the aggregate consumers' demand under standard, but not necessarily convincing assumptions (Kirman (1992)). There was also...

We analyze the contract between an innovator and a developer, when the former has private information on his idea and the latter must exert efforts but may also quit the relationship after having been informed. We show that the equilibrium contracts distort downwards the developer's incentives...

We test in a laboratory experiment three regulations imposed on a common-pool resource game: an access fee and subsidy scheme, transferable quotas and non-transferable quotas. Theory predicts that they all reduce resource use from free access to the same target level without hurting users. We...

This paper presents an analytic narrative of three decades of oil and violence in Nigeria, assuming rational choice by all the actors. It argues that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the government had to choose between spending money on preventing pollution and terrorizing the population away from the...

Contractual execution generates hard information, available to the contracting parties, even when contracts are secretly executed. Building on this simple observation, the paper shows that incomplete contracts can be preferred to complete contracts. This is because (i) execution of incomplete...

To make a prediction of a response variable from an explanatory one which takes into account features such as multimodality, a nonparametric approach based on an estimate of the conditional density is advocated and considered. In particular, we build point and interval predictors based on the...

The estimation of conditional probability distribution functions (PDFs) in a kernel nonparametric framework has recently received attention. As emphasized by Hall, Racine & Li (2004), these conditional PDFs are extremely useful for a range of tasks including modelling and predicting consumer...