A non-trivial fraction of people cannot afford to buy pharmaceutical products at unregulated market prices. This paper analyses the public insurance of a patent-protected pharmaceutical product in terms of price controls and socially optimal third-degree price discrimination. First, the paper...

Behavioral finance, a field that combines the psychology of investors with economics and other social sciences, has gained huge popularity in the recent past due to the volatility and complexity of the stock market. Therefore, the aim of the study is to review the literature on behavioral...

Fertility rates are declining in many countries. But are fertility rates inefficiently low? This paper addresses this question by exploring the efficiency properties of equilibria in an overlapping generations setting with endogenous fertility and dynastic parental altruism, using the notion of...

Heterogeneous beliefs among market participants can lead to questionable speculative trading that goes beyond any risk-sharing motives. We demonstrate that such unwarranted betting behavior in market equilibrium can be mitigated by introducing nonlinear pricing for ambiguous contracts, without...

Die Effizienz eines Alterssicherungssystems ist in der Wirtschaftspolitik sowohl aus mikroökonomischer als auch aus gesamtwirtschaftlicher Sicht von hoher Bedeutung. Die demographische Entwicklung führt in einem Umlageverfahren zu Fehlanreizen. Darüber hinaus wird dieser Effekt durch...

Intuitively, we expect that players who are allowed to engage in costless communication before playing a game would be foolish to agree on an inefficient outcome amongst the set of equilibria. At the same time, however, such preplay communication has been suggested as a rationale for expecting...

We explore whether individuals are averse to telling a Pareto white lie-a lie that benefits both themselves and another. We first review and summarize the existing evidence on Pareto white lies. We find that the evidence is relatively limited and varied in its conclusions. We then present new...

We investigate efficient and minimally unstable Pareto improvements over the deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism-a popular school choice mechanism that is stable but not efficient. We show that there is no Pareto improvement over the DA mechanism that is minimally unstable among efficient...

As the Eurozone crisis drags on, it is evident that a part of the problem lies in the architecture of debt and its liabilities within the Eurozone and, more generally, the European Union. This paper argues that a large part of the problem can be mitigated by permitting appropriately-structured...