In economies subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic risks, competitive equilibrium allocations are constrained inefficient: reallocations of assets support Pareto superior allocations. This is the case even if the asset market for the allocation of aggregate risks is complete. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D52; D60; H20

Adverse selection has a significant influence on trading efficiency in insurance markets. Inspired by the quality identification function of the probation period in the secondhand car market, an insurance contract with a low compensation period is designed. It is proved that the contract can distinguish the risk types of the policyholders to achieve a separating equilibrium. And it can make a s...

I present two modifications of the Vickrey-Clark-Groves mechanism to accommodate bidders’ budget constraints in the combinatorial auction setting and show that they are Pareto-Optimal and (partially) incentive compatible in certain domains.

A buyout option enhances an auction by allowing a bidder to purchase the item at a pre-specified price (instead of attempting to obtain the item by way of auction). A comparison is made between the ex ante welfare of bidders in an auction with a buyout option to a traditional auction with no such option. The impact on bidder welfare is shown to depend upon the distribution from which bidder val...

We provide a novel characterization of the feasible payo¤ set of a general two-player repeated game with unequal discounting. In particular, we show that generically the Pareto frontier shifts outwards and the feasible payo¤ set expands in the sense of set inclusion, as the time horizon increases. This result reinforces and re…nes the insight in Lehrer and Pauzner (1999) by showing that a longe...

This paper provides a welfare economic analysis of the problem of districting. In the context of a simple micro-founded model intended to capture the salient features of U.S. politics, it studies how a social planner should allocate citizens of different ideologies across districts to maximize aggregate utility. In the model, districting determines the equilibrium seat-vote curve which is the r...

Technology innovation engenders products of higher qualities and reduces production costs. This paper focuses on a two-sided platform tied with quality-improving hardware devices that are introduced sequentially. We analyze a monopolist’s dynamic pricing strategies facing decreasing future production cost and strategic buyers. Findings in both the traditional (buyer-side only) and two-sided bus...

Tagging efficiencies and purities are estimated for the decay modes H→ bb, H→ ττ and H→ cc of Higgs bosons produced at an s-channel muon collider Higgs factory.

A new distribution called the beta-generalized Pareto is proposed. Several properties of this distribution are presented. The expressions for the mean, mean deviation, variance, and entropies are obtained. The method of maximum likelihood is proposed to estimate the parameters of the distribution. The flexibility of this distribution is illustrated in an application to a real data set.