We analyze social and economic phenomena involving beliefs which people value and invest in, for affective or functional reasons. Individuals are at times uncertain about their own deep values and infer them from their past choices, which then come to define who they are. Identity investments...

Despite all of the talk about deregulation' of the electricity sector, a large number of non-market mechanisms have been imposed on emerging competitive wholesale and retail markets. These mechanisms include spot market price caps, operating reserve requirements, non-price rationing protocols,...

We analyze a number of unstudied aspects of retail electricity competition. We first explore the implications of load profiling of consumers whose traditional meters do not allow for measurement of their real time consumption, when consumers are homogeneous up to a scaling factor. In general,...

We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. Rewards or punishments (whether material or image-related) create doubt about the true motive for which good deeds are performed and this...

This paper first studies how cost padding, auditing and collusion with auditors affect the power of incentive schemes in procurement and regulation. Unaudited cost padding requires fixed price contracts. Incentive schemes are more powerful under imperfect auditing than under perfect auditing and...

This paper shows how the principal-agent approach, applied to the study of relationships between producers and retailers, can yield new insights in the analysis of vertical restraints such as resale price maintenance, exclusive territories agreements, or tieins... The paper surveys some alrealy...

We develop progressively models enabling us to characterize optimal contracts between government and firms when uncertainty and various types of asymmetric information (moral hazard and adverse selection) are present. We obtain normative contracts which are close to commonly used contracts with...

This paper extends the theory of network competition between telecommunications operators by allowing receivers to derive a surplus from receiving calls (call externality) and to affect the volume of communications by hanging up (receiver sovereignty). We investigate the extent to which receiver...