We recommend that an auction market replace the current system for submitting academic papers and show a strict Pareto-improvement of equilibrium. Besides the benefits of speed, this mechanmism increases the average quality of articles and journals and rewards editors and referees for their...

We examine the impact of information regarding other people’s choices on individual choice in a public good experiment with two separate treatments. In the implicit treatment, subjects do not see the average contribution of others in their group, but they can calculate it from the information...

A monopolistic urban water supplier may succeed or fail in providing good service to its captive customers. Regulators can use benchmarks to rank performance and create virtual competition, but quantified outputs are imperfectly correlated with outcomes that matter to customers. Even worse,...

Increasing water scarcity has attracted more businesses and their high-powered market tools to a sector that has been dominated historically by organizations operating under low-powered incentives. This paper compares business and bureaucratic institutions through three interfaces. The first...

Each year, about 2.8 million people die due to problems with poor water supply, sanitation and hygiene. Over three-quarters of the dead are children. Some argue that a human right to clean water would improve this situation. This paper shows that human rights are not sufficient to improve access...