For example, I learned that students are far more willing to believe physicists about physics, than to believe economists about economics. To help overcome this skepticism, I run some classroom experiments in my microeconomics courses. These experiments give students a good initial hook for the concepts of marginal value and cost, and they show that standard theory predicts experimental outcome...

This paper describes general methodology that allows one to extend Carnot efficiency of classical thermodynamic for zero rate processes onto thermodynamic systems with finite rate. We define the class of minimal dissipation processes and show that it represents generalization of reversible processes and determines the limiting possibilities of finite rate systems. The described methodology is t...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank my advisor, Dick Lipton, for his support throughout these years. I would also like to thank Milena Mihail and Vijay Vazirani for convincing me to join the Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech back in 2000. l certainly did not regret it! Special thanks to some of my friends and collaborators and Nayantara Bhatnagar for providing a great working environment. ...

This paper reviews a range of the most popular policy evaluation methods in empirical microeconomics: social experiments, natural experiments, matching methods, instrumental variables, discontinuity design and control functions. It discusses the identification of both the traditionally used average parameters and the more demanding distributional parameters. In each case, the necessary assumpti...

Solution The following is a Nash equilibrium: Player 1 calls and the other players do not call. Player 1’s payoff in this action profile is equal to v− c, and is greater than 0, which is the payoff he would get if he deviated and did not call. All the other players get a payoff of v, which is greater than the payoff that they would get if they were to deviate and call: v − c. Therefore, no play...