Endowment Effects in Contests

We design an experiment to test if the manner in which subjects receive the endowment has any bearing on the amount of overbidding in contests. We find that overbidding is significantly higher when subjects are given a large per-experiment endowment rather than when the endowment is given per-period. Risk-aversion and non-monetary utility of winning play important roles in explaining our findings.rent-seeking, contest, experiments, overbidding, endowment

Pilot Wave model that includes creation and annihilation of particles

The purpose of this paper is to come up with a Pilot Wave model of quantum field theory that incorporates particle creation and annihilation without sacrificing determinism. This has been previously attempted in an article by the same author titled "Incorporating particle creation and annihilation in Pilot Wave model", in a much less satisfactory way. In this paper I would like to "clean up" some of the things. In particular, I would like to get rid of a very unnatural concept of "visibility" of particles, which makes the model much simpler. On the other hand, I would like to add a mechanism for decoherence, which was absent in the previous version.Comment: 9 pages, no figure

The many levels pairing Hamiltonian for two pairs

We address the problem of two pairs of fermions living on an arbitrary number of single particle levels of a potential well (mean field) and interacting through a pairing force. The associated solutions of the Richardson's equations are classified in terms of a number $v_l$, which reduces to the seniority $v$ in the limit of large values of the pairing strength $G$ and yields the number of pairs not developing a collective behaviour, their energy remaining finite in the $G\to\infty$ limit. We express analytically, through the moments of the single particle levels distribution, the collective mode energy and the two critical values $G_{\rm cr}^{+}$ and $G_{\rm cr}^{-}$ of the coupling which can exist on a single particle level with no pair degeneracy. Notably $G_{\rm cr}^{+}$ and $G_{\rm cr}^{-}$ merge when the number of single particle levels goes to infinity, where they coincide with the $G_{\rm cr}$ (when it exists) of a one pair system, not envisioned by the Richardson theory. In correspondence of $G_{\rm cr}$ the system undergoes a transition from a mean field to a pairing dominated regime. We finally explore the behaviour of the excitation energies, wave functions and pair transfer amplitudes finding out that the former, for $G>G_{\rm cr}^{-}$, come close to the BCS predictions, whereas the latter display a divergence at $G_{\rm cr}$, signaling the onset of a long range off-diagonal order in the system.Comment: 35 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, to be published in EPJ