We consider a symmetric two-player common-value setting where each player gets a private signal about the object value. We show that for some parameter values the equilibrium revenue can be higher in a Tullock contest than in the standard auctions.

This article studies how a government should distribute funds among research institutions and how it should allocate them to basic and applied research. Institutions differ in reputation and efficiency, and have an information advantage. The government should award funding for basic research to induce the most productive institutions to carry out more applied research than they would like. Institutions with better reputation do more research than otherwise identical ones, and applied research is inefficiently concentrated in the most efficient high reputation institutions. The article provides theoretical support for a dual channel funding mechanism, but not for full economic costing.

We provide a universal condition for rationalizability by risk-averse expected utility preference in a demand-based framework with multiple commodities. Our test can be viewed as a natural counterpart of a classical test of expected utility, due to Fishburn (1975), in a demand setting.

This paper explores the determinants of firm survival in export markets. We build an exporter dynamics model where firms need to pay market-specific sunk and fixed costs to operate abroad and where firm export profitability in each foreign market follows a geometric Brownian motion. Firms also differ ex ante by a constant market-specific profitability shifter. We derive the probability of export survival upon entry in a market and show that it increases with the ratio of sunk to fixed costs and is insensitive to the profitability shifters. Also, we show that the survival probability is unaffected by fixed costs if sunk costs are zero. We take the model to the data using firm-level Argentine export information. We find that survival rates decrease with distance, which the model rationalizes with sunk costs that increase with distance proportionally less than fixed costs. Estimated sunk costs are small. In fact, a counterfactual exercise shows that removing those costs increases aggregate exports by less than 1.5\%. Finally, we also find that survival increases with a firm’s export experience. Analogously to distance, the model’s implication of this empirical result is that experience reduces sunk costs proportionally less than fixed costs.

We examine the effects of trade liberalization in environmental goods in a model with one domestic downstream polluting firm and two upstream firms (one domestic, one foreign). The upstream firms offer their technologies to the downstream firm at a flat fee. The domestic government sets the emission tax rate after the outcome of R\&D is known. The effect of liberalization on the domestic upstream firm's R\&D incentive is ambiguous. Liberalization usually results in cleaner production, which allows the country to reach higher welfare. However this increase in welfare is typically achieved at the expense of the environment (a backfire effect).

© The Author 2015. Committee voting has mostly been investigated from the perspective of the standard Baron-Ferejohn model of bargaining over the division of a pie, in which bargaining ends as soon as the committee reaches an agreement. In standing committees, however, existing agreements can be amended. This article studies an extension of the Baron-Ferejohn framework to a model with an evolving default that reflects this important feature of policymaking in standing committees: In each of an infinite number of periods, the ongoing default can be amended to a new policy (which is, in turn, the default for the next period). The model provides a number of quite different predictions. (i) From a positive perspective, the key distinction turns on whether the quota is less than unanimity. In that case, patient enough players waste substantial shares of the pie each period and the size principle fails in some pure strategy Markov perfect equilibria. In contrast, the unique Markov perfect equilibrium payoffs in a unanimity committee coincide with those in the corresponding Baron-Ferejohn framework. (ii) If players have heterogeneous discount factors then a large class of subgame perfect equilibria (including all Markov perfect equilibria) are inefficient.

© 2015. Individuals respond to the risk of contagious infections by restricting interaction and by investing in protection. We develop a model that examines the trade-off between these two actions and the consequences for infection rates.There exists a unique equilibrium: individuals who invest in protection choose to interact more relative to those who do not invest in protection. Changes in the contagiousness of the disease have non-monotonic effects: as a result interaction initially falls and then rises, while infection rates too may initial increase and then decline.We then consider a society with two communities that differ in their returns from interaction - High and Low. Individuals in isolated communities exhibit different behavior: the High community has a higher rate of protection and interaction, and a lower rate of infection. Integration amplifies these differences.

We consider a setup where agents care about i) taking actions that are close to their preferences, and ii) coordinating with others. The preferences of agents in the same group are drawn from the same distribution. Each individual is exogenously matched with other agents randomly selected from the population. Starting from an environment where everyone belongs to the same group, we show that introducing agents from a different group (whose preferences are uncorrelated with those of each of the incumbents) generates costs but may also (surprisingly) generate benefits in the form of enhanced coordination.

People often form expectations about others using the lens of their own attitudes (the so-called consensus effect). We study the implications of this for trust and trustworthiness in an evolutionary model where social preferences are endogenous. Trustworthy individuals are more "optimistic" than opportunists and are accordingly less afraid to engage in market-based exchanges, where they may be vulnerable to cheating. Depending on the distribution of social preferences in the population, the material benefits from greater participation may compensate for the costs of being trustworthy. By providing an explicit account of how individuals form and revise their beliefs, we are able to show the existence of a polymorphic equilibrium where both trustworthiness and opportunism coexist in the population. We also analyze the effect of enforcement, distinguishing between its role as deterrence of future misbehavior and as retribution for past misbehavior. We show that enforcement aimed at deterring opportunistic behavior has ambiguous effects on social preferences. It may favor the spreading of trustworthiness (crowding in), but the opposite (crowding out) may also occur. By contrast, crowding out never occur when punishment is merely intended as retribution.

We consider infinite-horizon economies populated by a continuum of agents subject to idiosyncratic shocks. This framework contains models of saving and capital accumulation with incomplete markets in the spirit of works by Bewley, Aiyagari, and Huggett; models of entry, exit, and industry dynamics in the spirit of Hopenhayn’s work; and dynamic models of occupational choice and search models as special cases. Robust and easy-to-apply comparative statics results are established with respect to exogenous parameters as well as various kinds of changes in the Markov processes governing the law of motion of the idiosyncratic shocks.