Since the probability of finding a job is affected not only by individual effort but also by the aggregate state of the economy, designing unemployment insurance payments conditional on the business cycle could be valuable. This paper answers a fundamental question related to this issue: How...

The work of Friedrich Von Hayek contains several testable predictions about the nature of market processes. Vernon Smith termed the most important one the ‘Hayek hypothesis’: equilibrium prices and the gains from trade can be achieved in the presence of diffuse, decentralized information,...

The work of Friedrich Von Hayek contains several testable predictions about the nature of market processes. Vernon Smith termed the most important one the ‘Hayek hypothesis’: the gains from trade can be realized in the presence of diffuse, decentralized information, and in the absence of...

This paper studies equilibria of second price auctions in independent private value envi- ronments with different participation costs. Two types of equilibria are identified: monotonic equilibria in which a bidder with a lower participation cost results in a lower cutoff for sub- mitting a bid,...

This paper studies equilibria of second price auctions when values and participation costs are both privation information and are drawn from general distribution functions. We consider the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium. It is shown that there always exists an equilibrium for this...

What do markets for voluntary climate protection imply about people's valuations of en- vironmental protection? I study this question in a large-scale field experiment (N=255,000) with a delivery service, where customers are offered carbon offsets that compensate for emissions. To estimate...

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which may naturally arise in environments where agents have different wealth...

We investigate Groves mechanisms for economies where (i) a social outcome specifies a group of winning agents, and (ii) a cost function associates each group with a monetary cost. In particular, we characterize both (i) the class of cost functions for which there are Groves mechanisms such that...

This study explores two key factors influencing subjects' deviation from domi- nant bidding in Vickrey auction experiments. The first factor examines subjects' understanding of strategy-proofness (SP), while the second focuses on "human interaction" which includes social preferences (spite and...

We develop a dynamic model of political competition. Each party has a policymotivated ideological wing and an office-motivated opportunistic wing. A blockade arises if inner-party conflict stops policy implementation. We use this model to study whether early elections should be used to overcome...