We present a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a class of optimal control problems with pure state constraints for which the objective function is linear in the state variable but the objective function is only required to be upper semicontinuous in the control variable. We apply...

Asylum policy-making in advanced democracies frequently faces the accusation that prejudice and stereotyping lead to erroneous decisions. The model of taste-based discrimination suggests that the biases of decision-makers or their peers against certain groups of applicants influence the...

Asylum policy-making in advanced democracies frequently faces the accusation that prejudice and stereotyping lead to erroneous decisions. The model of taste-based discrimination suggests that the biases of decision-makers or their peers against certain groups of applicants influence the...

We consider the problem of a principal who wishes to contract with a privately informed agent and is not able to commit to not renegotiating any mechanism. That is, we allow the principal, after observing the outcome of a mechanism to renegotiate the resulting contract without cost by proposing...

Proxy wars are a key pattern of political conflict and interstate competition. Rather than resorting to direct conflicts, which are costly and entail a higher level of uncertainty, governments may opt for proxy wars, which may last longer, but are less costly and render them more immune to...

This paper provides a complete characterization of optimal contracts in principal-agent settings where the agent's action has persistent effects. We model general information environments via the stochastic process of the likelihood-ratio. The martingale property of this performance metric...