We consider the cost of providing incentives through tournaments when workers are inequity averse and performance evaluation is costly. The principal never benefits from empathy between the workers, but he may benefit from their propensity for envy depending on the costs of assessing...

We analyze a two-task work environment with risk-neutral but inequality averse individuals. For the agent employed in task 2 effort is verifiable, while in task 1 it is not. Accordingly, agent 1 receives an incentive contract which, due to his wealth constraint, leads to a rent that the other...

We compare the wage costs of providing incentives through group versus individual bonus schemes. When workers are envious, either scheme may be the least cost one owing to the trade-off between the dissatisfaction with the prospect of unequal pay and the incentives it generates Nous comparons...

We argue that the common law standard of proof, given the rules of evidence, does not minimize expected error as usually argued in the legal literature, but may well be efficient from the standpoint of providing maximal incentives for socially desirable behavior. By contrast, civil law's higher...

I examine the case where fulfillment of a contractual commitment is only imperfectly verifiable and ask whether the court should then "tell the truth"" regarding the action in dispute. I show that truth seeking does not maximize the expected surplus from contractual relationships. From the...

Two firms produce a good with a horizontal and a vertical characteristic called quality. The difference in the unobservable quality levels determines how the firms share the market. We consider two scenarios: In the first one, firms disclose quality; in the second one, they send costly signals...

This article develops a simple model using the economist's toolkit to analyze the mechanism of judicial proof. The survey focuses on the notions of burden of proof, legal presumptions, standard of proof, on legal procedure and on the judge's role during the proceedings. The rules of proof are...

The similarity between objects is a fundamental element of many learning algorithms. Most non-parametric methods take this similarity to be fixed, but much recent work has shown the advantages of learning it, in particular to exploit the local invariances in the data or to capture the possibly...

A standard model of the exploitation of a renewable resource by non-cooperating agents is considered. Under the assumption that the resource is sufficiently productive we prove that there exist infinitely many Markov-perfect Nash equilibria (MPNE). Although these equilibria lead to...

In this paper, we study and put under a common framework a number of non-linear dimensionality reduction methods, such as Locally Linear Embedding, Isomap, Laplacian Eigenmaps and kernel PCA, which are based on performing an eigen-decomposition (hence the name 'spectral'). That framework also...