infonet-economy

We consider symmetric rent-seeking contests with independent private valuations of the contest prize. For a two-parameter specification with continuous types, we fully characterize the Bayesian equilibrium, and study its basic properties. The willingness to waste is a hump-shaped function of the private valuation, with the median type expending the highest share of her valuation. A...

The proportion of sustainable property in the total building stock remains small. One reason is that the financial added value resulting from sustainability is not sufficiently taken into account in property valuation due to the tendency of valuations to lag behind market trends. This article presents the development of a new approach that attempts to provide the quantitative...

More and more academic journals are adopting an open access policy by which articles are accessible free of charge, while publication costs are recovered through author fees. We study the consequences of this open access policy on the quality standard of an electronic academic journal. If the journal's objective were to maximize social welfare, open access would be optimal....

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. Such rankings do not effectively measure research quality, which should be the essence of any evaluation. These quantity rankings are not objective; two citation rankings, based on different samples, produce entirely...

Awards—widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere—are motivators that derive their value from non-pecuniary concerns such as status and self-image. Quasi-experimental panel data from the call center of a large international bank allow us to estimate the causal impact on effort when receiving an award. The performance of winners proves to be significantly higher than that of...

Assuming that teachers are concerned with human capital formation and students - with ability signaling, in this paper we model a teacher-student relationship as an agency problem with conflicting interests. In our model, the teacher elicits effort from the student rewarding for it with a grade, the utility of which to the student is an ability signal inferred by the job market. In...

We build a general model for pricing defaultable claims. In addition to the usual absence of arbitrage assumption, we assume that one defaultable asset (at least) looses value when the default occurs. We prove that under this assumption, in some standard market filtrations, default times are totally inaccessible stopping times; we therefore proceed to a systematic construction of...