From experience, regulated monopolists learn to employ cost-reducing innovations. We characterize the optimal regulation of an innovating monopolist with unknown costs. Regulatory policy is designed to minimize current costs of service while encouraging development of cost-saving innovations. We...

The incentive and project selection effects of agent anonymity are investigated in a setting where an evaluator observes a subjective signal of project quality. Although the evaluator cannot commit ex ante to an acceptance criterion, she decides up front between informed review, where the...

This paper studies a collective decision problem in which a group of individuals with interdependent preferences vote whether or not to implement a public project of unknown value. A utilitarian social planner aggregates these votes according to a majority rule; but, unlike what is commonly...

We present a theory of charitable fund-raising in which it is costly to solicit donors. We fully characterize the optimal solicitation strategy that maximizes donations net of fundraising costs. The optimal strategy dictates that the fund-raiser target only those individuals whose equilibrium...

We provide a unified analysis of the canonical rational voting model with privately known political preferences and costs of voting. Focusing on type-symmetric equilibrium, we show that for small electorates, members of the minority group vote with a strictly higher probability than do those in...

We provide a full equilibrium characterization of warm-glow giving à la Andreoni (1989, 1990) by extending the Andreoni-McGuire (1993) algorithm. We then generalize and offer an intuitive meaning to the large-economy crowding-out results by Ribar and Wilhelm (2002). The algorithm indexes...

This article examines the use of switching costs by long-lived strategic buyers to manage dynamic competition between rival suppliers. The analysis reveals how buyers may employ switching costs to their advantage. We show that when switching costs are high, a buyer may induce suppliers to price...