2025 Zayira Ray
Julius Silver Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science,
Professor of Economics, New York University
Research Associate, NBER
Part-Time Professor, University of Warwick
Research Fellow, CESifo
Spool Member, ThReD

Department of Economics, 
New York University,
19 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10012, U.S.A.
debraj.ray@nyu.edu, +1 (212)-998-8906.

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Oxford University Press, 2008. This book is now open-access; feel free to download a copy, and to buy the print version if you like the book.
≋ Three Randomly Selected Papers
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Egalitarianism and Incentives

(with Kaoru Ueda), Journal of Economic Theory 71, 324-348, 1996.

Summary. A group of agents is collectively engaged in a joint productive activity. Each agent supplies an observable input, and output is then collectively shared among the members according a social welfare function. However, individual actions are taken on a selfish basis, and the collective decision is only made after inputs are chosen. This leads to inefficiency. The aim of this paper is to show formally that, contrary to popular belief, the degree of inefficiency decreases in the extent of egalitarianism embodied in the social welfare function.

A Non-Cooperative Theory of Coalitional Bargaining

(with Kalyan Chatterjee, Bhaskar Dutta and Kunal Sengupta),  Review of Economic Studies 60, 463-477, 1993.

Summary. We explore a sequential-offers model of n-person coalitional bargaining with transferable utility and with time discounting. Our focus is on stationary equilibria of the resulting non-cooperative game. Efficient stationary equilibria converge to a point in the core as the discount factor approaches 1. For strictly convex games, this is the egalitarian solution of Dutta and Ray (Econometrica 1989).

India’s Lockdown: An Interim Report

(with S. Subramanian), May 2020, Indian Economic Review, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41775-020-00094-2

Summary. The world has continued to change rapidly since the last version of this article was written on May 20, 2020. Yet, as this article goes to press, we are aware of two realities; first, that we cannot perennially chase a moving target, but second, that nothing about the fundamental trends that we have identified appear to have changed. India is firmly in the throes of a vicious pandemic that we can only hope will abate with the development of an effective vaccine. Our plea for the widespread provision of adequate health and medical facilities, adequate protection for the elderly, and transfers to those severely affected by the lockdown are absolutely unchanged in the face of the latest data. In contrast, the brutal enforcement of a lockdown with none of these accompanying measures can only worsen outcomes for the poorest and most vulnerable among the population.