This paper presents a simple price-theory approach to Covid-19 lockdown and reopening policy. The key idea is to conceptualize R ≤ 1 as a constraint, allowing traditional economic and societal goals to be the policy objective, all within a simple static optimization framework. This approach...

We propose a new market design for trading financial assets. The design has three elements: (1) traders may place orders for any user-defined linear combination of assets,with arbitrary positive and negativeweights; (2) orders are downwardsloping piecewise-linear demand curves with quantities...

Economists have long been puzzled by event-ticket underpricing: underpricing both reduces revenue and encourages socially wasteful rent-seeking by ticket brokers. This paper studies the introduction of auctions into this market by Ticketmaster. We first show theoretically that Ticketmaster's...

We propose a criterion of approximate incentive compatibility, strategy-proofness in the large (SP-L), and argue that it is a useful second-best to exact strategy-proofness (SP) for market design. Conceptually, SP-L requires that an agent who regards a mechanism's “prices” as exogenous to...

The amount of computational power devoted to anonymous, decentralized blockchains such as Bitcoin's must simultaneously satisfy two conditions in equilibrium: (1) a zero-profit condition among miners, who engage in a rent-seeking competition for the prize associated with adding the next block to...