We study contests in which contestants are homogeneous and have convex effort costs. Increasing contest competitiveness, by making prizes more unequal, scaling up the competition, or adding new contestants, always discourages effort. These results have significant implications: although often...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy responses in an economy featuring sectorial heterogeneity in the frequency of price adjustments. It shows that a central bank facing heterogeneous nominal rigidities is more likely to behave less aggressively than in a fully sticky economy. Hence, the...

From a macroeconomic perspective, price rigidity is often perceived to be an important source of price dispersion, with significant implications for the dynamic properties of aggregate variables, welfare calculations, and the design of optimal policy. For instance, in standard New Keynesian...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy responses in an economy featuring sectorial heterogeneity in the frequency of price adjustments. It shows that a central bank facing heterogeneous nominal rigidities is more likely to behave less aggressively than in a fully sticky economy. Hence, the...

This note presents necessary conditions for non-degenerate price dispersion in a continuous atomistic market where buyers with price-elastic demand search sequentially for the lowest price, and firms maximize profit subject to a variable average cost function