The knowledge constraints and transactions costs imposed by geographical distance, network connections and time conspire to justify local behavior as a good approximation for global rationality. We consider a class of games to illustrate this relationship and raise some questions as to what...

In order to explain in a systematic way why certain combinations of market, financial, and legal structures may be intrinsic to certain capabilities to exchange real goods, we introduce criteria for abstracting the qualitative functions of markets. The criteria involve the number of strategic...

With the growing recognition of the role played by geography in all sorts of economic problems, there is strong interest in measuring the size and scope of local spillovers (i.e., simple anonymous agglomeration or congestion effects, or more complicated interactions between individuals or firms...

A central feature of many models of location choice – whether of firms or households, within or across cities – is the role of local interactions or spillovers, whereby the payoffs from choosing a location depend in part on the number or attributes of other individuals or firms that choose...

We consider parametric examples of two-bidder private value auctions in which each bidder observes her own private valuation as well as noisy signals about her opponent's private valuation. In such multidimensional private value auction environments, we show that the revenue equivalence between...

Child labor exists because it is the best response people can find in intolerable circumstances. Poverty and child labor are mutually reinforcing: because their parents are poor, children must work and not attend school, and then grow up poor. Child labor has two important special features....

Different forms of market making systems can be found in most developed capital markets. These markets, instead of having a pure electronic limit order book design, follow one of three forms of market making: 1) a quote-driven market making system, 2)a centralized market making system in an...

We examine the trades of individual and professional investors around stock splits and find that splits bring about a significant shift in investor clientele. We find that a higher fraction of post-split trades are made by less sophisticated investors, as individual investors increase and...

We show that a demand function is derived from maximizing a quasilinear utility function subject to a budget constraint if and only if the demand function is cyclically monotone. On finite data sets consisting of pairs of market prices and consumption vectors, this result is equivalent to a...

The quantal response equilibrium (QRE) notion of McKelvey and Palfrey (1995) has recently attracted considerable attention, due largely to its widely documented ability to rationalize observed behavior in games played by experimental subjects. We show that this ability to fit the data, as...