Americans drive 2,360,000,000,000 miles each year, far outstripping other nations. Every time a driver takes to the road, and with each mile she drives, she exposes herself and others to the risk of accident. Insurance premiums are only weakly linked to mileage, however, and have largely...

This paper shows that up-front payments can play a crucial role in providing efficient investment incentives when contracts are incomplete. They can eliminate the overinvestment effect identified by Rogerson [1984] and Shavell [1980] when courts use an expectation damage remedy. This method...

Economics

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics. This assumption is often justied either formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, we show that in almost every game and for almost every family of...

This paper develops a general methodology for characterizing the dynamic evolution of preferences in a wide class of strategic interactions. We give simple conditions characterizing the limiting distribution of preferences in general games, and apply our results to study the evolutionary...

This paper studies the extent to which qualitative features of Walrasian equilibria are refutable given a finite data set. In particular, we consider the hypothesis that the observed data are Walrasian equilibria in which each price vector is locally stable under tatonnement. Our main result...

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics. This assumption is often justified either formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, this paper shows that in almost every game, payoff. maximization...