Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Essays On Industrial Organization And Environmental Economics, Cristina Marie Reiser

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine how regulation by a central authority motivates changes in behavior.

Chapter 1 identifies the role of a tolerance policy as a manager’s regulatory mechanism which can deter worker misconduct in rank-order tournaments. When contestants’ actions cannot be perfectly monitored or doing so is prohibitively costly, misconduct takes place. This chapter develops a theoretical model in which contestants compete for a prize in a symmetric tournament and in which the organizer tolerates some level of misconduct. In addition to showing that zero tolerance does not minimize equilibrium misconduct, it also shows there exists …