Jimmy Chan

Does banning affirmative action lower college student quality

Banning affirmative action from college admissions cannot prevent an admissions office that cares about diversity from achieving it in ways other than explicitly considering race. We model college admissions where candidates from two groups with different average qualiÞcations compete for a Þxed number of seats. Under affirmative action, an admissions office that cares both about quality and diversity admits the best-qualiÞed candidates from each group. Under a ban, it may promote diversity by partially ignoring candidates’ qualiÞcations and therefore not admitting the best-qualiÞed candidates from either group. A ban always reduces diversity and may also lower quality. (JEL J71 ,J 15, I28)

Collusion enforcement with private information and private monitoring

This paper shows that a cartel that observes neither costs, prices, nor sales may still enforce a collusive agreement by tying each firms continuation profit to the truncated current profits of the other firms. The mechanism applies to both price and quantity competition, and the main features are broadly consistent with common cartel practice identified by Harrington and Skrzypacz [24].

Approximate efficiency in repeated games with side-payments and correlated signals

Side-payments are common in many long-term relationships. We show that when players can exchange side-payments, approximate efficiency is achievable in any repeated game with private monitoring and communication, so long as the players can observe their own payoffs and are sufficiently patient, the efficient stage-game outcome is unique, and the signal distribution has full support. Unlike existing results in the literature, our result does not require deviations be statistically detectable.