Strategic trade in international markets is important for agricultural and other basic commodities. State trading companies (STCs) and large private firms control most of the trade volume. In this study the authors use concepts of modern game theory to treat time inconsistency issues associated...

Strategic trade in international markets is important for agricultural and other basic commodities. State trading companies (STCs) and large private firms control most of the trade volume. In this study the authors use concepts of modern game theory to treat time inconsistency issues associated...

We consider optimal trade policy for a large country with private information. We show that the optimal tariff leads to a signaling equilibrium with higher tariffs and lower welfare than under complete information, whereas the optimal import quota replicates the complete information equilibrium...

This paper examines contracts used in the North American sugarbeet industry. Though quite similar in many respects, the contracts we study vary across processing firms in the set of quality measures used to condition contract payments to growers. This is somewhat surprising, given the...

We examine the choice of efficient decision rules in a budget-balanced organization. The organization awards a scarce ``project'' to the organization member who values it most, and redistributes some surplus from the project among all remaining members. An auction-based allocation rule tends to...

This paper is about the strategy of retaining unobserveably heterogeneous firms attracted by unobserveably valued outside alternatives. We prove that differentiating tax/public good fiscal packages within one?s own locale dominates offering the same packages to all firms. We rationalize the full...

We consider optimal trade policy for a large country with private information. We show that the optimal tariff leads to a signaling equilibrium with higher tariffs and lower welfare than under complete information, whereas the optimal import quota replicates the complete information equilibrium...