This paper develops a model of terrorist activity and behavior. A terrorist organization chooses the size and the number of attacks. The defending state chooses the level of security-deterrence measures. The equilibrium sequence is such that the Organization moves first, followed by the State. A...

This paper shows that in a contest with the "Tullock" forms of contest success function, an increase in the number of contestants always reduces individual effort. However, when the outcome of the contest is governed by a noisy function of effort, then individual effort could either increase or...

We analyze two robust portfolio selection models, where a mean-variance investor considers possible deviations from a reference distribution of asset returns, adopting a maxmin criterion. The two models differ in the metric used to measure the distance between the reference distribution of asset...

This paper focuses on the signalling role of debt maturity. The main novelty of the paper is that it analyzes a setting in which high quality firms use collateral as a complementary device along with debt maturity to signal their superiority. Model simulations suggest a non-monotonic...

In order to incorporate demand interdependencies into the analysis of fairness between the different consumer groups of a multi-product public utility, Baumol (1986) designed the burden test. This test checks whether the price of a single good generates net incremental revenues which cover at...

This paper extends models of renewable resources to an economy with two sectors, resource extraction and production. In contrast to one sector models, we show that the optimal strategies in the single-firm model are essentially different from those in the two-player model. In the single-player...

This paper considers the optimality of setting a secret reserve price in ascending auctions. Contrary to intuition, an ascending auction is no longer equivalent to a second price auction when the reserve price is secret. We determine the seller's optimal reserve price policy when the bidders'...