It is argued that drug consumption, most commonly alcohol drinking, can be a technology to give up some control over one's actions and words. It can be employed by trustworthy players to reveal their type. Similarly alcohol can function as a "social lubricant" and faciliate type revelation in...

The first essay “Informational Asymmetries in Laboratory Asset Markets with State-Dependent Fundamentals” investigates the formation of market prices in a new experimental setting involving multi-period call-auction asset markets. In this paper, we are particularly interested in two...

In this paper, we ask under what conditions norms can enhance welfare by mitigating moral hazard in income insurance. We point out a particular role of norms, namely to compensate for insurers' difficulties in monitoring the behavior of insured individuals. Thus, the functioning of social norms...

We develop a simple yet realistic model of income insurance, where the individual’s ability and willingness to work is treated as a continuous variable. In this framework, income insurance not only provides income smoothing, it also relieves the individual from particularly burdensome work. As...