In most times and places, women on average marry men who are older than themselves. We propose a partial explanation for this difference and for why it is diminishing. In a society where the economic roles of males are more varied and specialized than the roles of females, it may be that the...

The authors explain why buyers in the housing market use an agent employed by the seller. Such agents reduce buyers' search costs so that more buyers search a particular house. This increases the probability of the sale of the house and possibly also its selling price. However, since the selling...

We have found several propositions in the economics of information which depend on the log of the cumulative distribution distribution of a random variable being a concave function. In this paper we present several theorems and applications of the property of log-concavity.

The authors study the impact of voluntary trade by the manager. They find that, in contrast to standard signaling models, an action is good news for some firms and bad news for others, depending on observable characteristics of the firm, its managers, and their compensation plans. Further,...

In many applications, assumptions about the log-concavity of a probability distribution allow just enough special structure to yield a workable theory. This paper catalogs a series of theorems relating log-concavity and/or log-convexity of probability density functions, distribution functions,...