Refunds are modelled as a market response to asymmetric information. A firm's choice of product reliability is private information, and not verifiable. Firms compete by offering price-refund contracts; consumers draw inferences about quality from the observed contracts. In equilibrium, quality...

Refunds are modeled as a competitive market response to asymmetric information. Firms have private information on their choice of product quality, and compete by offering pricerefund contracts. Consumers who care about quality draw inferences about the quality offered by the various firms from...

A dynamic model of intergovernmental competition for a large plant is presented, when local productivity is uncertain. One firm determines the location of its plant in each period by conducting an auction, soliciting bids from local governments. Equilibrium subsidies from the local governments...

The economics of producing and consuming children is an immensely important but largely neglected area. The authors model the allocation of parents' time between market production and childcare, a choice driven by both consumption and investment motives. They identify two externalities in the...

This paper makes five contributions to the modeling of societies organized primarily according to age. First, it models the social rules adhered to by a particular age-group society, the Rendille of Northern Kenya. Second, it shows that their age-group rules are well represented by the standard...

From Africa through North America to Asia, anthropologists have found societies with formalized age-group systems. In these societies, social and economic relations between individuals are regulated by well-established rules governing transitions through the lifecycle. In this paper we detail...

Birth order effects are found in empirical work, but lack theoretical foundations. Our new approach to modelling children provides this. Each child has the same genetic make-up and parents do not favour a child based on its birth order. Each child’s needs change as it grows, and births are...

We examine the allocation of spending by divorced parents on both private goods and goods which they share with their child. Sole and joint custody arrangements differ in the pattern of shared goods. Parents play a non-cooperative game. We compute the putcomes under sole and joint custody, and...