We consider a health authority seeking to allocate annual budgets optimally over time to minimize the discounted social cost of infection(s) evolving in a finite set of R = 2 groups. This optimization problem is challenging, since as is well known, the standard epidemiological model describing...

In markets for many fruits, vegetables, and an increasing number of imported goods, consumers cannot discern the quality of a product prior to purchase and can never identify its producer. Producing high-quality, safe goods is costly for a firm and raises the collective reputation for quality...

We derive several comparative-static results for Cournot games when firms have nonconstant marginal-cost curves which shift exogenously. The results permit us to rank certain vectors of equilibrium marginal costs with the same component sum according to their associated social surplus or...

The common-property problem results in excessive mining, hunting, and extraction of oil and water. The same phenomenon is also responsible for excessive investment in R&D and excessive outlays in rent-seeking contests. We propose a "Partnership Solution" to eliminate or at least mitigate these...

Throughout the developing world, many water distribution systems are unreliable. As a result, it becomes necessary for each household to store its own water as a hedge against this uncertainty. Since arrivals of water are not synchronized across households, serious distributional inefficiencies...

Book chapter without abstract

While reviewing "Game Theory and the Law" by Douglas Baird, Robert Gertner, and Randal Picker, this essay provides a self-contained, layman's introduction to modern noncooperative game theory

While reviewing "Game Theory and the Law" by Baird, Gertner and Picker, the essay provides a self-contained, nontechnical introduction to modern noncooperative game theory.

A modification of Chung and Fuchs’ (Mem. Amer. Math. Soc., 6 (1951), pp. 1-12) recurrence theorem for random walks leads to an analogous result for a different discrete parameter Markov process. This latter process is applicable to an analysis of price stabilization programs involving...

We consider a monopolist selling durable goods to consumers with unit demands but different preferences for quality. The seller can offer items of different quality at the same time to induce buyers to self-select, as in Mussa-Rosen (1978), but is not artificially constrained to offer only one...