A seller wishes to prevent the discovery of rival offers by its prospective customers.  We study sales techniques which serve this purpose by making it harder for a customer to return to buy later after a search for alternatives.  These include making an exploding offer, offering a "buy-now"...

We generalize the class of apex game by combining a winning coalition of symmetric minor players with a collection of apex sets which can form winning coalitions only together with a fixed quota of minor players.  By applying power indices to these games and their subgames we generate players'...

An online platform makes a profit by auctioning an advertising slot that appears whenever a consumer visits its website.  Several firms compete in the auction, and consumers differ in their preferences.  Prior to the auction, the platform gathers data which is statistically correlated with...

This paper compares historical poverty baskets to modern food security and poverty lines.  Changes in the historical baskets and indexing methods are proposed to bring historical studies into better alignment with modern measures as well as with historically based estimates of energy...

We experimentally investigate the extent to which social obervability of one's actions and the possibility of social non-monetary judgment affect the decision to engage in rule breaking behavior.  We consider three rule bfeaking scenarios - theft, bribery and embezzlement - in the absence of...

The causes of the USA's exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India.  Habakkuk's views on the causes of American industrial pre-eminence are reassessed.  While the USA had abundant natural...

If additional information about the distribution of a random variable is available in the form of moment conditions, a weighted kernel density estimate reflecting the extra information can be constructed by replacing the uniform weights with the generalised empirical likelihood probabilities. ...

It is often suggested that incentive schemes under moral hazard can be gamed by an agent with superior knowledge of the environment, and that deliberate lack of transparency about the incentive scheme can reduce gaming.  We formally investigate these arguments.  Ambiguous incentive schemes...

In many economic applications involving comparisons of multivariate distributions, supermodularity of an objective function is a natural property for capturing a preference for greater interdependence.  One multivariate distribution dominates another according to the supermodular stochastic...

We show that the US in-bond system of imports may be used by firms to illegally avoid trade barriers, a practice known as in-bond diversion.  Digging into official Chinese and Mexican trade statistics, we uncover traces of US quota-hopping in-bond diversion by Chinese exports of textiles and...