Prisoner's dilemmas can lead rational people to interact in ways that lead to persistent inefficiencies. These dilemmas create a problem for institutional designers to solve: devise institutions that realign individual incentives to achieve collectively rational outcomes. I will argue that we do...

We consider a differential information economy with infinitely many commodities and analyze the veto power of the grand coalition with respect the ability of blocking non-Walrasian expectations equilibrium allocations. We provide two different Walrasian expectations equilibrium equivalence...

We point out several conceptual difficulties of the rational expectations equilibrium concept. In particular we show that such an equilibrium need not be incentive compatible and need not be implementable as a perfect Bayesian equilibrium . A comparison of rational expectations equilibria with...

Many economics problems are maximization or minimization problems, and can be formalized as problems of solving “linear difference systems” of the form <InlineEquation ID="Equ1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$r_i-r_j \geqq c_{ij}$</EquationSource> </InlineEquation> and r <Subscript> k </Subscript>-r <Subscript> l </Subscript> c <Subscript> kl </Subscript>, for r-unknowns, with given c-constants. They typically involve strict as well as weak...</subscript></subscript></subscript></equationsource></inlineequation>

In a repeated game with private information, a perfect public equilibrium (PPE) can break down if communication is not necessarily simultaneous or if players can “spy” on each others’ information. An ex post perfect public equilibrium (EPPPE) is a PPE that is ex post incentive compatible...

We analyze the allocation of priority in queues via simple bidding mechanisms. In our model, the stochastically arriving customers are privately informed about their own processing time. They make bids upon arrival at a queue whose length is unobservable. We consider two bidding schemes that...

The “first wave” of donor sponsored anti-corruption programmes usefully focused on elaborating recommendations for parliamentarians or tried to train them (develop human capital) in anti-corruption. Now it time for these programmes to take into account parliamentarian incentives to adopt...

We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...

This paper studies alternative price-service mechanisms for a provider that serves customers whose delay cost depends on their service valuations. We propose a generalized delay cost structure that augments the standard additive model with a multiplicative component, capturing the...