Gift giving is thought to decrease welfare. Recipients are sometimes stuck with gifts they would not have purchased because the giver does not perfectly know the recipient's preferences and in-kind gifts cannot be costlessly refunded. Such gifts are welfare reducing compared to giving cash if,...

We study all-pay contests with effort-dependent rewards under incomplete information. A contestant's value to winning depends not only on his type but also on the effort-dependent reward chosen by the designer. We analyze which reward is optimal for the designer when his objective is either...

While auction research, including asymmetric auctions, has grown significantly in recent years, there is still little analytical solutions of first-price auctions outside the symmetric case. Even in the uniform case, Griesmer et al. (1967) and Plum (1992) find solutions only to the case where...

We formulate a way to study whether the asymmetry of buyers (in the sense of having different prior probability distributions of valuations) is helpful to the seller in private-value auctions (asked first by Cantillon [2001]). In our proposed formulation, this question corresponds to two...

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, one of the best baseball players in the last few decades, affected the performance of his teammates. In his...