We seem to prefer that medicine and medical care be provided through altruistic motives. Even the pharmaceutical industry justifies its behavior in terms of altruistic purposes. But economists have known since Adam Smith that self-interested behavior can create large and growing social benefits. This is true for medical care as well as for other goods. First, I consider specifically the case of...

Improving the information retrieval (IR) performance of peer-to-peer networks is an important and challenging problem. Recently, the computer science literature has attempted to address this problem by improving IR search algorithms. However, in peer-to-peer networks, IR performance is determined by both technology and user behavior, and little attention has been paid in the literature to impro...

Technical debt refers to the phenomena of taking a shortcut to achieve short term development gain at the cost of increased maintenance effort in the future. The concept of debt, in particular, the cost of debt has not been widely studied. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to determine ways to measure the ‘interest’ on the debt and use these measures to see how much of the technical debt inc...

We develop a model of currency crises, in which traders are heterogeneously informed, and interest rates are endogenously determined in a noisy rational expectations equilibrium. In our model, multiple equilibria result from distinct roles an interest rate plays in determining domestic asset market allocations and the devaluation outcome. Except for special cases, this finding is not affected b...

This paper presents a self-supervised framework for training interest point detectors and descriptors suitable for a large number of multiple-view geometry problems in computer vision. As opposed to patch-based neural networks, our fully-convolutional model operates on full-sized images and jointly computes pixel-level interest point locations and associated descriptors in one forward pass. We ...

This paper studies the internal politics of a licensing association with regards to expansion of the licensure, and to self-regulation. A theoretical model is presented of a professional association which has the power to restrict entry, and yet a majority of its members may prefer to allow entry, even when doing so reduces the total revenue of its members. This may happen due to a con‡ict of i...

Ð Regulations that are designed to improve social welfare typically begin with the premise that individuals are purely self-interested. Experimental evidence shows, however, that individuals do not typically behave this way; instead, they tend to strike a balance between self and group interests. From experiments performed in rural Colombia, we found that a regulatory solution for an environmen...