This note introduces and discusses the concept of pu-dominance in the context of finite games in normal form. It then presents the pu-dominance criterion for equi- librium selection. The pu-dominance criterion is inspired by and closely related to the p-dominance criterion (Morris et al., 1995)...

We introduce and examine a game in which players can steal parts of a homo- geneous and perfectly divisible pie from each other. The expected effectiveness of a player's theft is proportional to the share of the pie he currently owns. We show how the incentives to preempt or to follow the rivals...

In a market where sellers solicit certication to overcome adverse selection, we show that the profit of a monopolistic certifier is hump-shaped in his reputation for accuracy: a higher accuracy attracts high-quality sellers but sometimes repels low-quality sellers. As a consequence, reputational...

We investigate whether lack of familiarity may contribute to an explanation of the gender gap in stock market participation and risk taking. We use ads in widely read women magazines to select companies that we assume to be more familiar to women than to men, and construct a “pink”...

This paper shows how the European integration process overburdened EU law in an attempt to overcome political deficiencies, with negative consequences for the Union’s democratic legitimacy. The analysis is framed by the ‘twin crises’ of twenty-first century EU constitutionalism: the defeat...

We propose a parsimonious model with adverse selection where delinquency, renegotiation, and bankruptcy all occur in equilibrium as a result of a simple screening mechanism. A borrower has private information about her cost of bankruptcy, and a lender may use random contracts to screen different...

The paper studies the equilibrium value of bid-ask spreads and time- to-trade in a continuous-time, intermediated fi?nancial market. The en- dogenous spreads are the price at which brokers are willing to offer imme- diacy. They include physical trading costs. Traders intervene optimally, when...

The paper explores the fit properties of a class of multivariate Lévy processes, which are characterized as time-changed correlated Brownian motions. The time-change has a common and an idiosyncratic component, to re ect the properties of trade, which it represents. The resulting process may...

We present a partnership model where heterogeneous agents bargain over the gains from trade and search on the match. Frictions allow agents to extract higher rents from more productive partners, generating an endogenous preference for high types. More productive agents upgrade their partners...

This paper deals with the open issue about the choice between a centralized versus a decentralized public procurement strategy. Using a unique dataset on tender prices of selected drugs for hospital usage awarded by a sample of 52 Italian local health service providers (ASLs) between 2009 and...