This note shows that when the designer of a contest wishes the winner have high ability, she is better off giving a head start to one of the contestants even if they are ex-ante identical. If the contestants are ex-ante asymmetric, the designer should give a head start to the one who is more...

This paper studies information transmission in social surveys where a welfare maximizing decision maker communicates with a random sample of individuals from a large population who have heterogeneous preferences. The population distribution of preferences is unknown and has to be estimated,...

type="main" xml:id="sjpe12054-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>We analyse a labour-matching model with wage posting, where – reflecting institutional constraints – firms cannot differentiate their wage offers within certain subsets of workers. Inter alia, we find that the presence of impersonal wage...</p>