Traditionally seen as the ‘soft’ side of the business there is now substantial evidence to show that incorporating consistent satisfaction measurement, acting on patient feedback and developing leaders to elevate the priority in these areas improves patient loyalty, improves operational effi ciency, improves the capacity to treat more patients, retains staff and ultimately provides increased fi...

How should multilateral trade policy be designed in a world in which countries differ in terms of market access and technology, and firms with market power differ in terms of productivity? We answer this question in a model of monopolistic competition in which variable markups increasing in firm size are a key source of misallocation across firms and countries. We use ‘disadvantaged’ to refer t...

We study a model where agents experience anger when they see a firm that has displayed insuffi cient concern for their clients’welfare (altruism) makes high profits. Regulation can increase welfare, for example, through fines (even with no changes in prices). Besides the standard channel (effi ciency), regulation affects welfare through 2 channels: (i) regulation calms down existing consumers b...

We study a dynamic market with asymmetric information that creates the lemons problem. We compare effi ciency of the market under different assumptions about the timing of trade. We identify positive and negative aspects of dynamic trading, describe the optimal market design under regularity conditions and show that continuous-time trading can be always improved upon.

We analyze the political philosophy question of what kind of welfare differentials are allowed if we respect private ownership rights over self and public ownership of the external world. We consider cases where agents have equal rights over the publicly owned external world resources but are individually responsible for their preferences. We discuss that these ownership rights are naturally re...

A TALE FROM twelfth-century Germany introduces this lecture. It concerns, a kindly woman and her neighbour whose son was very ill. In an effort to help save the child, she produced a pebble and recommended to the child’s mother that she make a revitalising drink by steeping it in water. There was nothing unusual about this sort of domestic remedy, yet her wellintentioned iniative met with rebuf...

Resource misallocation lowers aggregate productive effi ciency. The existing literature often infers the magnitude of misallocation from the dispersion of average revenue products. However, the methodology is subject to several identification issues. In particular, the estimator would be upward biased by the presence of unobserved heterogeneities in output and demand elasticities; adjustment co...

Should capital and labor be taxed, and if so how when individuals’labor and capital income are subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic risks? In a two period general equilibrium model with production, we first show that reducing investment is welfare improving if households are homogeneous enough ex ante. On the other hand, when the degree of heterogeneity is suffi ciently high a welfare improveme...

In this paper we analyze the risk attitude of a group of heterogeneous agents and we develop a theory of comparative collective risk tolerance. In particular, we characterize how shifts in the distribution of individual levels of risk tolerance affect the group’s attitude towards risk. In a model with effi cient risk-sharing and two agents an increase in the level of risk tolerance of one or of...