Organizational Design and Technology Choice under Intrafirm Bargaining: Comment by Catherine C. de Fontenay and Joshua S. Gans. Published in volume 93, issue 1, pages 448-455 of American Economic Review, March 2003

Since its launch in 2009 much has been written about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains. While the discussions initially took place mostly on blogs and other popular media, we now are witnessing the emergence of a growing body of rigorous academic research on these topics. By the nature of the phenomenon analyzed, this research spans many academic disciplines including macroeconomics, law and economics, and computer science. This survey focuses on the microeconomics of crypto-currencies themselves. What drives their supply, demand, trading price, and competition amongst them? This literature has been emerging over the past decade and the purpose of this paper is to summarize its main findings so as to establish a base upon which future research can be conducted. (JEL D82, E42, G12)

This is a submitted manuscript of an article published by the American Economic Association in the American Economic Review.

ABSTRACT Insurance pricing is subject to stricter regulation in some states than others. This cross-sectional variation, coupled with the occurrence of staggered deregulation in several states, enables a powerful test of the political cost hypothesis that managers manipulate accruals to mitigate adverse effects of rate regulation. We show that insurers understate their loss reserve accruals in more regulated regimes, a finding that contrasts with most prior studies documenting expense-increasing accruals in regulatory pricing settings like utilities. We theorize and find evidence that regulator-enabled cartel-like collective rate making leads to premiums being higher than the competitive level. Our results are consistent with accounting manipulation being used to justify deviating from these high rates and showcase a role for accounting in cartel enforcement. JEL Classifications: M41; G18; G22; G32.

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the persistent use of alphabetical name ordering on academic papers in economics. In a context in which market participants are interested in evaluating the relative individual contribution of authors, it is an equilibrium for papers to use alphabetical ordering. Moreover, it is never an equilibrium for authors always to be listed in order of relative contribution. In fact, we show via an example that the alphabetical name ordering norm may be the unique equilibrium, althoug multiple equilibria are also possible. Finally, we charaterize the welfare properties of the noncooperative equilibrium and show it to produce research of lower quality than is optimal and than would be achieved if coauthors were forced to use name ordering to signal relative contribution.