This paper concerns the increasing use of international commitment devices by developing countries. These devices include bilateral investment treaties, international arbitration, and multilateral trade commitments. The conventional wisdom is that such devices help to remedy local institutional...

Durable-goods producers frequently choose to monopolize the maintenance markets for their own products. This paper shows that similar to leasing, one reason a firm may employ this practice is that it reduces or even eliminates problems due to time inconsistency. We first demonstrate this result...

Tough anti-terrorism policies are often defended by focusing on a fixed minority of dangerous people who prefer violent outcomes, and arguing that toughness reduces the risk of terrorism from this group. This reasoning implicitly assumes that tough policies do not increase the group of...

Intertemporal choice has been drawing attention in econophysics and neuroeconomics. In this paper, we experimentally estimate the parameters and AICc (Akaike Information Criterion with small sample correction) of intertemporal choice models (exponential, simple hyperbolic, quasi hyperbolic, and...

Absentmindedness is a special case of imperfect recall, in which a single history includes more than one decision node in an information set. Put differently, players, after making a decision, sometimes face it again without recalling having ‘been there before’. Piccione and Rubinstein (Game...

This paper analyzes the incentive effects of pollution taxes versus pollution permits for a budget oriented Government. Pollution permits are analyzed as durable goods, and a pollution tax is seen as an equivalent to leasing pollution permits. First, a general model is developed and then four...