We show that weak concavity of the cost function leads to optimality of single prize in contests with maximal performance objective, which generalizes the previous result in Chawla et al. (2015). Moldovanu and Sela (2001) show that, with the constant elasticity functional form, enough convexity...

Petroleum administration can be regarded as a principal-agent problem. The government allocates exploration and production rights to petroleum companies on behalf of the population. The government is the principal and the companies are agents. With the aim of capturing revenue for the state, the...

In their seminal contribution Lazear and Rosen (1981) show that wages based upon rank induce the same e¢ cient e¤ort as incentive-based reward schemes. They also show that this equivalence result is not robust towards heterogeneity in worker ability, as long as ability is private information,...

In an important paper, Aghion and Bolton (1987) argue that a buyer and a seller may agree on high liquidation damages in order to extract rents from future suppliers. As this may distort future trade, it may be socially wasteful. We argue that Aghion and Bolton's' analysis is incomplete in some...

This paper introduces a counterfactual technique to estimate net emigration from Norwegian birth cohorts from 1846 to 1900. A main finding is that despite strong fluctuations in annual emigration, the percentage reduction of each cohort due to emigration was surprisingly stable for all cohorts...

This paper considers a symmetric imperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contest in which there may be several winners. The authors first demonstrate a serious flaw in previous work and then go on to suggest an alternative method for analyzing the contest. In contrast to the previous work, they...