An influential literature has used the aftermath of terrorist attacks to estimate large effects of police street deployment on crime. However, the elasticities obtained in these settings may not easily extrapolate to more standard circumstances. This paper exploits a natural experiment that...

In dynamic promotion contests, where performance measurement is noisy and ordinal, selection can be improved by biasing later stages in favor of early leaders. Even in the worst-case scenario, where noise swamps ability differences in determining relative performance, optimal bias is i) strictly...

This paper sheds light on a recent empirical controversy about the effect of competition on price discrimination in airline markets (Borenstein and Rose (1994), Gerardi and Shapiro, (2009)). We introduce individual demand uncertainty into Hotelling's model of horizontal product differentiation...

This paper sheds light on an empirical controversy about the effect of competition on price discrimination. We introduce individual demand uncertainty into Hotelling's model of product differentiation and show that firms offer advance purchase discounts. Consumers choose between an early...

When products are sold in advance, i.e. prior to consumption, consumers trade off an early, uninformed purchase at a low price against a late, informed purchase at a high price. This paper considers the effect of market structure on the prevalence of advance selling. We show that in an...

Do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most-able contestants? To what extent do contestants avoid competition? In this paper, we show, theoretically and empirically, that the distribution of abilities plays a crucial role in determining contest choice. Complete sorting exists only...

This paper provides a rationale for equal sharing in heterogeneous partnerships. We introduce project choice and information sharing to a standard team production setting. A team with two agents can choose whether they want to work on a status quo project or on an alternative project. If the...

This paper proposes a mechanism design approach, capable of endogenizing a monopolist's choice between selling and renting in a non-anonymous durable goods setting with short-term commitment. Allowing for mechanisms that determine the good's allocation not only at the beginning but also at the...

This paper proposes a tractable model of a dynamic contest where players have private information about the contest's prize. We show that private information helps to encourage players who have fallen behind, leading to an increase in aggregate incentives. We derive the optimal information...