Leaky-bucket transactions can be regarded as income transfers allowing for transaction costs. In its most rudimentary form, leaky-bucket transactions trace out the maximum leakageʺ of transaction costs before income inequality is exacerbated, or before a welfare loss is experienced. This notion...

Rank-order tournaments are usually modeled simultaneously. However, real tournaments are often sequentially. We show that agents' strategic behavior significantly differs in sequential tournaments compared to simultaneous tournaments. In a sequential tournament, under certain conditions the...

Rank-order tournaments are usually modeled simultaneously. However, real tournaments are often sequentially. We show that agents' strategic behavior significantly differs in sequential tournaments compared to simultaneous tournaments. In a sequential tournament, under certain conditions the...

This paper studies a monopsonistic firm's optimal employment contracts if workers have private information on both their propensity for social comparisons and their ability. Employees of the firm are taken to form their own distinct reference group. It is shown that screening workers with equal...

We develop a stylized model of horizontal and vertical competition in tournaments with two competing firms. The sponsor cares about the quality of the design but also about the design location. A priori not even the sponsor knows his preferred design location, which is only discovered once he...

We model entrepreneurship and the emergence of firms as a result of simultaneous bidding for labor services among heterogeneous agents. Unique to our approach is that occupational choices, job matching and organizational forms are determined simultaneously, so that the opportunity costs of...

This paper suggests that a non-binding minimum wage may act as a focal point for tacit collusion in the low-wage markets, pulling down wages of some otherwise higher paid workers. A simple game-theoretic argument explaining the emergence of collusive equilibrium is developed, which is then...