hroughout the 1990s, internal and external environmental shifts were affecting the cultural sector. The nonprofit arts were being challenged by an increasing awareness of the need to diversify traditional revenue streams. In addition, arts organizations were experiencing real and enduring shifts in available resources, as well as rising resistance to the view of the cultural sector as deserving...

We identify a novel channel through which competition among information providers decreases the efficiency of electoral outcomes. The critical insight we put forward is that the level of competition in the market determines the type of information that is provided in equilibrium. In our model, voters can disagree on which issues are important to them (agenda) and on how each issue in their agen...

Deployment of limited resources is an issue of major importance for decision-making in crisis events. This is especially true for large-scale outbreaks of infectious diseases. Little is known when it comes to identifying the most efficient way of deploying scarce resources for control when disease outbreaks occur in different but interconnected regions. The policy maker is frequently faced with...

In many contracting settings, actions costly to one party but with no direct benefits to the other (money-burning) may be part of the explicit or implicit contract. A leading example is bureaucratic procedures in an employer-employee relationship. We study a model of delegation with an informed agent, where the principal may impose money-burning on the agent as a function of the agent’s choice ...

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...

In many service systems arising in OR/MS applications, the servers may be temporarily unavailable, a fact that affects the sojourn time of a customer and his willingness to join. Several studies that explore the balking behavior of customers in Markovian models with vacations have recently appeared in the literature. In the present paper, we study the balking behavior of customers in the single...

We calculate the socially optimal level of illiquidity in a stylized retirement savings system. We solve the planner’s problem in an economy in which time-inconsistent households face a tradeoff between commitment and flexibility (Amador, Werning and Angeletos, 2006). We assume that the planner can set up multiple accounts for households: a perfectly liquid account and/or partially illiquid ret...