In a school choice mechanism, school priorities are often based on student exam scores, by which student true ability may not be perfectly revealed. An ex-post fair matching mechanism (for example, Serial Dictatorship) can be undesirable in that it is not ex-ante fair: it may not match students with higher abilities to better schools, although it always matches students with higher scores to be...

The paper discusses the interaction of ex ante and ex post institutional convergence in the post-Soviet world, i.e. 12 members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. It starts with analysing empirical evidence for institutional convergence in the CIS, and then considers two channels of convergence: institutional competition for mobile capital and ex ante harmonization via interaction in pol...

I study large random assignment economies with a continuum of agents and a …nite number of object types. I consider the existence of weak priorities discriminating among agents with respect to their rights concerning the …nal assignment. The respect for priorities ex ante (ex-ante stability) usually precludes ex-ante envy-freeness. Therefore I de…ne a new concept of fairness, called no unjusti…...

Environmental policies employ metaphoric objectives such as ecosystem health, resilience and sustainable provision of ecosystem services, which influence corresponding sustainability assessments by means of normative settings such as assumptions on system description, indicator selection, aggregation of information and target setting. A heuristic approach is developed for sustainability assessm...

I introduce an integrated model of risk attitudes and other-regarding preferences that extends the standard notion of inequity discount to lotteries. In this model, a decision maker perceives inequity partly by comparing the marginal risks she and others face. It predicts that fairness considerations will alter risk attitudes, in particular, a higher tolerance to positively correlated (fair) ri...

The co-existence of conventional and transgenic products in the food chain introduces new elements in the evaluation of the profitability of transgenic crops and, consequently, on the farmer’s adoption decision. In particular, one emerging problem farmers are facing in Europe is related to the legal liability of transgenic-crop cultivation. In Europe, a mixture of ex-ante regulations and ex-pos...

Diagnostic information allows an agent to predict the state of nature about the success of an investment project better than the prior. We analyze the optimal pricing scheme for selling diagnostic information to buyers with different, privately known, ex ante success probability. Investment costs and returns of successful projects are assumed to be the same for all buyers. The value of diagnost...

We look at a principal–agent model in which the agent has to perform an action, the difficulty of which is better known ex interim than ex ante. We compare two contracting regimes; one with commitment to an ex ante negotiated contract, and one with an ex interim negotiated contract. The ex ante contract can not be too steep, but attempts to negotiate a steeper ex interim contract may result in ...

This article examines a tradeoff between ex ante preparedness costs and ex post costs of response to a potential introduction of an infectious animal disease. In a simplified case study setting we examine the conditions for optimality of enhanced detection system considering various characteristics of a potential infectious cattle disease outbreak, costs of program implementation, severity of t...

1 We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire (covert) information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists that provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient allocation conditional on the private information ex-post. It is shown that in every private value envir...