Social preferences such as altruism, reciprocity, intrinsic motivation and a desire to uphold ethical norms are essential to good government, often facilitating socially desirable allocations that would be unattainable by incentives that appeal solely to self-interest. But experimental and other...

Social preferences such as altruism, reciprocity, intrinsic motivation and a desire to uphold ethical norms are essential to good government, often facilitating socially desirable allocations that would be unattainable by incentives that appeal solely to self-interest. But experimental and other...

This dissertation thesis consists of three independent research papers and is devoted to the topic of worker turnover and incentive contracts in a labour market characterized by search frictions and matching. There exists a large body of literature dating back to the seminal studies by Diamond,...

The thesis studies the potential of incentive contracts for politicians using game-theoretic methods. Supplementing the election mechanism with these contracts is a new idea to make politicians more accountable. Two types of incentive contracts are considered: a) monetary incentive contracts...

Solid waste management services are contracted out to private firms in many U.S. communities. Household waste collection, transport, and disposal are relatively straightforward services to define within the terms of a contract. The addition of recycling, however, significantly complicates...

Policy makers aiming to get private landholders to provide non-marketed environmental services need to provide efficient economic incentives. Two ideas have been explored to achieve this: linking contract payments to environmental outcomes and putting the contracts up for tender. This paper...

This paper explores two ideas to enhance the performance of agri-environmental contracting schemes: linking contract payments to environmental outcomes and putting the contracts up for tender. This paper investigates whether there are any gains to be had by combining the benefits of both...

This dissertation is composed of three essays considering the role of private information in economic environments. The first essay considers efficient investments into technologies such as auditing and enforcement systems that are designed to mitigate information and enforcement frictions that...

Drawing on the theoretical and empirical evidence that private information risk is priced in the expected returns of equities, we hypothesize that information risk premium is an important component of the risk premium that leads to the violation of uncovered interest rate parity (UIRP). Using an...

University of Minnesot Ph.D. dissertation. July 2010. Major: Economics. Advisor: Larry E. Jones and Narayana R. Kocherlakota. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 99 pages, appendices A-B.