arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 19, 2026 — 00:13:24 EST
States and alliances spend enormous resources signaling resolve to deter adversaries. Two canonical strategies are burning money (sunk costs) and burning bridges (audience costs). Large audience costs can deter effectively, but they may be infeasible and, even when feasible, can increase the likelihood of war relative to burning...
This paper studies how Chile's three largest pharmacy chains moved from the price war to collusion, using court-record daily prices and a structural model. After a court-ordered advertisement ban ended the comparison campaign, the estimated gain from loss-leader pricing fell sharply, weakening the incentive to continue the price war....
Two frequent approaches for identifying structural VARs are external instruments, which carry economic content but are often weak, and non-Gaussianity of the shocks which provides statistical identification but carries no economic meaning. We combine the two strategies in a single generalized method of moments framework that stacks...
We introduce a notion and motivation for very credible auctions. This is a strengthening in the commitment in the credible auctions setting, making it more suitable for a modern digital applications.
Observed choice in a dynamic game mixes current profit with continuation value. A rival adds a second problem: the same comparison averages over the rival's equilibrium policy. Changing the primitive transition rewrites continuation technology; changing the rival's Markov policy, holding that law fixed, rewrites the mixture over...
We study strategy-proof social choice where agents have single-dipped preferences and outcomes may be sets of alternatives. While point-valued strategy-proof rules select an endpoint, we ask which outcomes survive when sets are compared through responsive extensions. Under the standard responsive extension, preferences over...
In social and economic networks linked agents often share connections in common. There are two competing explanations for this phenomenon. First, agents may have a structural taste for transitive links - the returns to linking may be higher if two agents share a common connection. Second, agents may assortatively match on unobserved...
This paper provides an explicit characterization of the (unique) equilibrium of the two-bidder all-pay auction with asymmetrically distributed, independent private values. The characterization is achieved through recasting the problem into its equivalence in the quantile space and thereby obtaining equilibrium bid functions that...
This study examines emission interdependencies within the waste sector and between waste and other economic domains, energy, transport, water, and communications, using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodologies with emphasis on process-based and hybrid approaches. The analysis employs the EXIOBASE multi-regional input-output database....
If a probability measure is a mean-preserving contraction of another, the two measures are said to be in convex order. This paper provides a complete characterization of mean-preserving contractions and their extreme points in the multidimensional setting, extending the results of Kleiner, Moldovanu, Strack, and Whitmeyer (2024) to...
Experimental evidence suggests that ambiguity-sensitive choice can vary systematically with the circumstances of a decision. This paper isolates one channel within a stable preference relation: ambiguity weighting may depend on the act's certainty-equivalent level. After the standard Anscombe-Aumann calibration of consequence utility,...
We study a mechanism of cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). Incorporating social preferences as efficiency concerns into the PD game, we study how altruism translates into cooperation. Under complete information, cooperation requires the opponent's altruism to clear a threshold. We then introduce a subjective extension of...
We show how to optimally design experiments when the resulting data will be used to choose a welfare-maximizing policy subject to constraints. A decision maker seeks to maximize Bayes expected welfare by choosing a policy whose effects depend on an unknown finite-dimensional parameter. The decision maker has access to a first wave of...
This paper studies identification in linear quantile panel models with unrestricted individual heterogeneity when the number of time periods is fixed and small. We impose strict exogeneity, whereby the conditional quantile restriction holds given the individual's complete regressor history and latent individual effect, but otherwise...
Many real-world policies and business interventions require assessing short-term effects to inform timely decisions, even though most causal inference methods focus on long-term average treatment effects. In this paper, we introduce average treatment effect localization (ATEL), which captures localized, short-term policy impacts in...
We study peer monitoring design in knowledge production. A principal leads agents who work on different but related tasks. By working on their own tasks, agents acquire information that is useful for evaluating their peers' performance. We consider robust contracts under which effort by all agents is the unique rationalizable outcome....
Whether organisational separation of elective and emergency care improves physician productivity remains an open question. Most existing evidence relies on cross-sectional comparisons or volume-based outcomes that cannot isolate efficiency gains from input expansion or provider selection. In contrast, this paper exploits the staggered...
We investigate the strategic communication of narratives under model uncertainty. The sender has private information about the true data-generating process of publicly observable data. The receiver is uncertain about how to interpret the data, but aware of the sender's incentives to strategically provide interpretations...
In many power systems, wind and solar generation increasingly often exceeds electricity demand. Curtailing renewable generation in those hours matters both for prices and for the physical stability of the grid. Turning off wind turbines and solar panels is technically easier than ramping down a large power station, yet support schemes...
In this paper we consider situations of (multidimensional) spatial majority voting. We analyze such situations having an even number (greater than or equal to 4) of voters and assume that each voter's preference over the set of policies is ``Euclidean": i.e., each voter has a most preferred ``ideal" policy and the voter's pay-offs...
I derive an explicit mapping from initial assets, income and the real interest rate to consumption for an income fluctuation problem with a borrowing constraint and CARA utility. I show that there exists a threshold of initial wealth over which the partial equilibrium consumption response to a permanent increase in the real interest...
When a country's population declines, the aggregate economy appears to contract on the intensive margin: industrial diversity intact, every industry a little smaller. At the regional level, contraction is uneven and takes the extensive form: entire industries disappear, one after another. The relevant unit is the city: industries are...
In large markets, scarce attention limits partner evaluation and creates allocation loss, which stability magnifies. In an independent random market with average executable degree $d$, unmatched shares fall at rates $e^{-\sqrt d}$ under stability and $e^{-d}$ under maximum matching on the same graph. Changing consideration can make...
Drug-drug interaction (DDI) errors pose serious risks to patient safety. Existing decision-support systems often require physicians to respond to alerts, disrupting workflows and contributing to high override rates. We examine whether a non-mandatory information intervention can reduce DDI errors and foster learning. Using a...
This paper studies difference-in-differences with staggered adoption and a continuous, time-invariant dose. Each cohort-time comparison contains two margins. The level margin is the average treatment effect at realized doses. Under level parallel trends it equals the level contrast between the treated cohort and not-yet-treated...