In markets where product quality is important, more than one characteristic is usually necessary to define product quality and the amelioration of the goods characteristics is usually costly. Then, properties of production technologies, in particular if they exhibit economies or diseconomies of...

We use a simple version of the Psychological Expected Utility Model (Caplin and Leahy, QJE, 2001) to analyze the optimal choice of information accuracy by an individual who is concerned with anticipatory feeling. The individual faces the following trade-off: on the one hand information may lead...

We compare the alternative approaches for regulating genetic information in the health insurance market when prevention measures are available. In the model, firms offer insurance contracts to consumers who are initially uninformed of their risk type but can obtain such information by performing...

The issue of technical progress under uncertainty is nested into the debate on vertical integration vs outsourcing, to show that, in general, the former is preferable to the latter in terms of both expected profits and technological efficiency. It is then shown that there exist (i) an optimal...

This paper applies generalized Lorenz analysis to income distributions of ten countries using advanced statistical procedures to construct confidence bands around estimates and to generate truncated generalized Lorenz curves to construct a poverty ordering of the countries.

This paper studies how the structure and quality of education influence occupational choices and the distribution of wages. Structure refers to the age at which children are streamed into specialized programs as well as the proportion of students placed in each stream. The Roy (1951) model of...