We consider a differential game of a conflict between two factions who both have a desire to exact revenge. We show that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, the desire for revenge need not lead to escalation of conflicts. Surprisingly, in the open-loop equilibrium, the weaker faction exerts a...

Consider a world with two people, 1 and 2, where person 1 (the proposer) may offer to help person 2 (the responder). The proposer may be altruistic towards the responder either out of a genuine desire to make her happy or out of guilt. The responder derives disutility from apparent acts of...

In this paper we examine the effect of greenhouse pollution, as measured by CO2 emissions, on economic growth among a set of OECD countries during the period 1981-1998. We examine the relationship between total factor productivity (TFP) growth and pollution using a semiparametric smooth...

This paper presents an axiomatic framework for measuring life time poverty over multiple periods. For an individual, we argue that lifetime poverty is influenced by both the snapshot poverty of each period and the poverty level of the "permanent" lifetime consumption; it is also influenced by...

Using the popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, this paper makes a contribution to the literatures on the design of contests, the allocation of voting rights in committees, and the desirability of low-powered incentive schemes. In American Idol, the judges, who are presumably experts in...

Asymmetric information in the form of moral hazard and adverse selection can result in sizeable efficiency losses and program costs for government provided crop insurance plans. We present a methodology and illustrative simulations to show how these two types of information problems interact in...

This note provides an explanation for why tax rates on capital gains are usually lower than ordinary income tax rates based on manager's agency problem related to "empire-building" or the underinvestment problem.

We compare misrepresentations of performance under a target-based compensation system with those under both a linear piece-rate system and a tournament-based bonus system using a laboratory experiment with salient financial incentives. An anagram game was employed as the experimental task....

Existing literature usually considers earnings manipulation to be a negative social phenomenon. We argue that earnings manipulation can be a part of the equilibrium relationships between firm's…insiders and outsiders. We consider an optimal contract between an entrepreneur and an investor where...

We process information in a large number of wage contracts, signed over a period of several decades, to generate the long-run history of the real wage for each bargaining pair. We term these hitherto unexamined histories ‘chronologies’. We are able to generate 1574 continuous real wage...