We give examples of strategic interaction which are beneficial for players who follow a "middle path" of balance between pure selfishness and pure altruism. JEL Classification: C70, C71, C72, C79.

Bride Price and Fertility Decisions: Evidence from Rural Senegal This paper is the first to provide evidence about the relationship between bride price payments and fertility decisions in the African context. Remarkably, the results show that bride price payments reduce fertility pressure, with a woman reducing her number of children by 0.5 at the mean bride price. The results are robust to dif...

This paper investigates the optimal management of a firm faced with a long-term liability that occurs at a random date. Three issues are analysed: the optimal dividend policy; optimal expenditure on safety to delay the occurrence of the liability; and the optimal liquidation date of the firm. An owner faced with dynamic unlimited liability never liquidates and therefore accumulates capital to t...

We examine the incentives for countries to go to war as they depend on the comparison of how much their pivotal decision-makers have at risk compared to how much they stand to gain from a war. How this ratio compares to the country at large is what we term “political bias”. If there is no political bias (a case that we loosely relate to a “pure democracy”), then there are always payments that o...

The analysis of macroeconomic variables for current situation in Iran indicates a Conundrum. Solving this puzzle is vital for Central Bank of Iran in order to choose an appropriate approach for monetary policy and banking supervision. Increase in liquidity growth rate, significant decrease of inflation rate and interest rate rigidity are the three sides of this puzzle. This study designs an inn...

Employment, Hours of Work and the Optimal Taxation of Low Income Families The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supply model. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcare costs and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considers purely Pareto improving reforms and also optimal desi...

This paper experimentally analyzes the schooling decisions of poor households with adolescent children in urban Brazil. Parents in our study were being paid large monthly transfers by the local government conditional upon their children attending school. We elicit parents’ incentivized choices between such conditional monthly payments and guaranteed, unconditional monthly payments of varying re...

We use a game theoretical framework to analyze the intraday behavior of banks with respect to settlement of interbank claims in a real-time gross settlement setting. The game played by banks depends upon the intraday credit policy of the central bank and it encompasses two well-known game theoretical paradigms: the prisoner’s dilemma and the stag hunt. The former arises in a collateralized cred...