Economic Science Institute

What’s a Spontaneous? At the beginning of each semester, I always have the same conversation. “Hey Mike, what classes are you taking?” Usually, I reply with a boilerplate list of regular law school classes, “I got lumped into professional responsibility, corporations, federal taxation, and evidence.” That’s a regular law school semester. But this year…it was

How Do Societies Avoid Collapse? Featured on The Property and Environment Research Center Blog, Friday, June 7, 2013 Economic research has long been subject to the same pitfall: it lacks a laboratory in which to carry out simple experiments. Unlike sciences such as physics or chemistry, economic data are messy, imperfectly measured, and affected by

May 10, Kimberly Wade-Benzoni, Ph.D. – The Egoism and Altruism of Intergenerational Behavior Abstract: Some of the most important issues in society today affect more than one generation of people. In this article, the authors offer a conceptual overview and integration of the research on intergenerational dilemmas—decisions that entail a tradeoff between one’s own self-interest

Some markets are ugly. Others work miracles. An article by Vernon L. Smith featured in the Daily Beast. “The Great Recession began in the fourth quarter of 2007. Measured in Depression clock time, 2012 was 1934, when the U.S. economy expanded 7.7 percent. Today such expansion seems remote. Rather, the economy is still stuck in

How Product Labeling Killed Some Truly Righteous Weed and Might Even Raise Your Hospital Bill by Megan McArdle In this article, published in the Daily Beast online, Author Megan McArdle uses experiments run by the Economic Science Institute’s Dr. Bart Wilson to discuss how transparency may have unexpected results to a market. Check out the full

Apr. 19, Raymond Deneckere, Ph.D. – Multi-Dimensional Screening: A Solution to a Class of Problems Abstract: We develop a general method for solving multi-dimensional screening problems in which the ‘physical’ allocation space is one-dimensional, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of ‘exclusion’ in the optimal mechanism. We illustrate the application of our

Apr. 12, Caroline Thomas, Ph.D. – N-Dimensional Colonel Blotto Game with Asymmetric Battlefield Values Abstract: This paper describes a geometrical method for constructing equilibrium distributions in the Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric battlefield values. It generalizes to the n-dimensional case a construction method first described by Gross and Wagner. The proposed method does particularly well

Apr. 5, David Cooper, Ph.D. – Ambiguity in Performance Pay: An Online Experiment Abstract: Many incentive plans do not include an explicit mapping between workers’ effort and compensation. Potential employees therefore face both risk and uncertainty when choosing whether to accept an employment contract. Using an online labor market, Amazon Mechanical Turk, we study the