We suggest that people higher up in the income ladder care more for the 'quality of life' rather than for the level of income per se. We introduce such a behaviourial assumption in a model of 'rural-urban'and 'urban-urban' migration. 'Quality of life' depends crucially on the 'social...

We consider a model of a single defendant and N plaintiffs where the total cost of litigation is fixed on the part of the plaintiffs and shared among the members of a suing coalition. By settling and dropping out of the coalition, a plaintiff therefore creates a negative externality on the other...

We consider an oligopolistic market game, in which the players are competing firms in the same market of a homogenous consumption good. The consumer side is represented by a fixed demand function. The firms decide how much to produce of a perishable consumption good, and they decide upon a...

This paper analyses competition of moral norms and institutions in a society where a fixed share of people unconditionally complies with norms and the remaining people act selfishly. Whether a person is a norm-complier or selfish is private knowledge. A model of voting-by-feet shows that those...

Most real world situations which are susceptible to herding are also characterized by direct payoff externalities. Yet, the bulk of the theoretical and experimental literature focuses on pure informational externalities. In this paper we study several different forms of payoff externalities that...

We report results of an internet experiment designed to test the theory of informational cascades in financial markets (Avery and Zemsky, AER, 1998). More than 6000 subjects, including a subsample of 267 consultants from an international consulting firm, participated in the experiment. As...

This paper extends the standard principal-agent model with moral hazard to allow for agents having reference- dependent preferences according to Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The main finding is that loss aversion leads to fairly simple contracts. In particular, when shifting the focus from...

This paper analyses management style as a governance mechanism in agency relationships when the lack of verifiable information restricts the contracting possibilities. Specifically, it investigates whether decision making should be supplemented by prior verification, and how these tasks should...

This paper analyses the relative efficiency of internal and external monitors. It confirms the intuition that, if the principal and her employees share aligned interests, internal monitoring is superior to external monitoring; vice versa if interests diverge. This result is not robust for two...