We develop a model of sequential presidential primaries in which several horizontally and vertically differentiated candidates compete against each other. Voters are incompletely informed about candidate valence and learn over time from election results in previous districts. We analyze the effects of learning about candidate quality, and the effects of candidate withdrawal on the vote shares, ...

Economists tend to adopt an empiricist approach to poverty, commonly calculating it as the proportion of the population that fall below some speci®ed income threshold. This approach has been developed to take into account heterogeneous household needs by using income equivalence scales, but most other individual characteristics are totally ignored. This paper questions the relevance of this app...

Recent work suggests that a person’s subjective well-being (SWB) depends to a large degree on relative-income. Focusing on the underlying identification, this paper makes four contributions to this literature: it describes the aggregation problem with past studies, implements an estimation strategy to overcome this problem, finds micro-level evidence in support of the hypothesis that relative-i...

Game-theoretic models of spatial competition usually assume that firms set prices after their choices of locations. Rather than make this assumption, this paper uses the core to model the competition between the firms. Two conditions are shown to be sufficient for efficient spatial competition. The first is that the firms’ location choices satisfy a no-externalities condition. The second is tha...

The control of drug activity currently favors supply-side policies: drug suppliers in the U.S. face a much higher arrest rate and longer sentences than drug demanders. We construct a simple model of drug activity with search and entry frictions in labor employment and drug transactions, where the drug price and the distribution of population in a community are determined according to an occupat...

Motivated by a recent work by Terashima (Phys. Rev. D60 084001), we revisit the fluctuation-dissipation (FD) relation between the dissipative coefficient of a detector and the vacuum noise of fields in curved spacetime. In an explicit manner we show that the dissipative coefficient obtained from classical equations of motion of the detector and the scalar (or Dirac) field satisfies the FD relat...

We introduce a framework of electoral competition in which voters have general preferences over candidates’ characteristics and policies. Candidates’ immutable characteristics (such as gender, race or previously committed policy positions) are exogenously differentiated, while candidates can choose any policy for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. Voters have general pr...

In this paper, we investigate the collective decision problem with incomplete information and side payments. We show that a direct mechanism associated with the social choice function that satisfies budget balancing, incentive compatibility, and interim individual rationality exists for generic prior distributions. We consider the possibility that a risk-averse principal extracts full surplus i...

The Persistence of Informality: Evidence from Panel Data Informality is a growing phenomenon in the developing and transition country labor market context. In particular, it is noticeable that working in an informal employment relationship is often not temporary. The degree of persistence of informality in the labor market might be due to different sources: structural state dependence due to pa...

This paper first identifies the determinants of income satisfaction of individuals within the household and, secondly, characterises whether their preferences are altruistic or egoistic. To that end, it formulates a theoretical framework from the collective family model whose stochastic formulations are estimated for 14 EU countries by using the eight waves of the European Community Household P...