The paper provides a framework for analysis of remuneration to agents whose task is to make well-informed decisions on behalf of a principal, with managers in large corporations as the most prominent example. The principal and agent initially bargain over the pay scheme to the latter. The...

A people's culture, norms and habits are important determinants not just of the quality of social life but of economic progress and growth. In this paper we take the view that while the importance of culture is undeniable, the innateness of culture is not. We work here with a single example and...

The paper analyses the interaction between economic incentives and work norms in the context of social insurance. If the work norm is endogenous in the sense that it is weaker when the population share of beneficiaries is higher, then voters will choose less generous benefits than otherwise. We...

In games with continuum strategy sets, we model a player's uncertainty about another player's strategy, as an atomless probability distribution over the other player's strategy set. We call a strategy profile (strictly) robust to strategic uncertainty if it is the limit, as uncertainty vanishes,...

We here develop a model of pre-play communication that generalizes the cheap-talk approach by allowing players to have a lexicographic preference, second to the payoffs in the underlying game, for honesty. We formalize this by way of an honesty (or truth) correspondence between actions and...

We analyze the interplay between economic incentives and social norms when individuals decide whether or not to engage in criminal activity. More specifically, we assume that there is a social norm against criminal activity and that deviations from the norm result in feelings of guilt or shame....

We consider a committee facing a binary decision under uncertainty. Each member holds some private information. Members may have different preferences and initial beliefs, but they all agree which decision should be taken in each of the two states of the world. We characterize the optimal...

Sets closed under rational behavior were introduced by Basu and Weibull (1991) as subsets of the strategy space that contain all best replies to all strategy profiles in the set. We here consider a more restrictive notion of closure under rational behavior: a subset of the strategy space is...

This paper provides two conditions of epistemic robustness, robustness to alternative best replies and robustness to non-best replies, and uses them to characterize variants of curb sets in finite games, including the set of rationalizable strategies.

In the original model of pure price competition, due to Joseph Bertrand (1883), firms have linear cost functions. For any number of identical such price-setting firms, this results in the perfectly competitive outcome; the equilibrium price equal the firms' (constant) marginal cost. This paper...