Advances in biomedical technology have irrevocably jarred open the black box of human decision making, offering social scientists the potential to validate, reject, refine and redefine the individual models of resource allocation that form the foundation of modern economics. In this paper we (1)...

Labels address a market failure - asymmetric information - through costly expenditures borne by consumers, firms, and taxpayers. In this review, we explore when mandatory and voluntary labeling policies may be socially optimal. Although the analysis ostensibly revolves around simple comparisons...

We estimate willingness to pay (WTP) to operate under two types of contracts - tournaments (Ts) and fixed performance-standard contracts (F). Our results are consistent with the notion that subjects having social preferences for fairness and care about risk. That is, when subjects experience...

Using experimental economics, we compare the efficiency and welfare effects of tournaments and fixed performance contracts. Our subjects (agents) were generally better off under fixed performance contracts, but the advantage of the fixed performance contract disappears if the relative magnitude...

We use a stated preference instrument to elicit producer preferences for the attributes of risk-shifting hog marketing contracts and express acceptable producer trade-offs between contract attributes in a convenient dollar metric. Respondents value an increase in a window contract's price...

We posit a spatially explicit, county-level model of the hog production sector and estimate how numerous firm-specific, locality-specific, and spatial agglomeration factors affect the location, movement, and intensity of hog production within 15 key hog production states. Spatial agglomeration,...