Managers of public water companies present themselves and are seen as public servants maximizing public welfare. Because water is rarely allocated through market mechanisms, this maximization requires that managers cooperate in a bureaucratic version of a social dilemma. Members of the...

This paper creates a game theoretic model to determine how pendulum arbitration or baseball arbitration impacts the incentives of litigants. Pendulum arbitration is when both parties submit competing proposals and the arbitrator chooses only one of the bids, in its entirety, to be binding on...

We develop the idea of using mean-variance preferences for the analysis of the first-price, all-pay auction. On the bidding side, we characterise the optimal strategy in symmetric all-pay auctions under mean-variance preferences for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders....

We analyse the all-pay auction with incomplete information and variance-averse bidders. We characterise the symmetric equilibrium for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders. Variance aversion is a sufficient assumption to predict that high-valuation bidders increase their...

We analyse the all-pay auction with incomplete information and variance-averse bidders. We characterise the unique symmetric equilibrium for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders. Variance aversion is a sufficient assumption to predict that high-valuation bidders increase...

Peoples' behavior in the aftermath of natural disasters may depend critically on various conditions. In this paper we postulate three conditions, likely to occur after massive natural disasters, that can adversely affect the trusting behavior of people within communities: rivalry for scarce...

We present a simple mechanism that can be implemented in a simple experiment. In a modified trust game, the allocator can offer to pay the investor to cooperate. The mechanism is successful at implementing efficient outcomes: participants manage to achieve an efficient outcome, when this is...

The public provision of private goods can be used as a self-selection device to identify income groups. This allows cost efficient redistribution between income groups even if the government cannot observe the individuals' incomes. This paper examines how redistribution through public provision...

We run several experiments which allow us to compare cooperation under perfect and imperfect information and under a centralized and decentralized punishment regime. We find that (1) centralization by itself does not improve cooperation and welfare compared to an informal, peer-to-peer...

This paper contrasts the smooth distribution of vaccinations for the annual flu against the contentious and clumsy distribution for vaccinations against Covid-19. I use this comparison to gain insight into the properties of markets and politics as vehicles for organizing human activity. The...