This paper aims at showing the relevance of procedural utility for economics: people do not only care about outcomes, as usually assumed in economics, they also value the processes and conditions leading to outcomes. The psychological foundations of procedural utility are outlined and it is...

This paper suggests that institutional factors which reward social networks at the expenses of productivity can play an important role in explaining brain drain. The effects of social networks on brain drain are analyzed in a decision theory framework with asymmetric information. We distinguish...

There are at least two reasons why multiple prizes can be optimal in symmetric imperfectly discriminating contests. First, the introduction of multiple prizes reduces the standard deviation of contestants’ effort in asymmetric equilibria, when the majority of contestants actively participate...

The optimal contest architecture for symmetric imperfectly discriminating contests is shown to be generically the two-stage tournament (rather than the one-stage contest). In the first stage the contestants compete in several parallel divisions for the right to participate in the second stage....

Centralized sanctioning institutions are of utmost importance for overcoming free-riding tendencies and enforcing outcomes that maximize group welfare in social dilemma situations. However, little is known about how such institutions come into existence. In this paper we investigate, both...