A recent settlement between Massachusetts and Partners HealthCare, along with successful antitrust actions by the Federal Trade Commission, may signal the beginning of the end of two decades of consolidation of health care providers. This consolidation has been associated with higher prices...

This article explores the hypothesis that the U.S. health care system operates more like a robber baron than like Robin Hood, burdening ordinary payers of health insurance premiums disproportionately for the benefit of industry interests and higher-income consumer-taxpayers. Thus, lower- and...

While American policymakers and commentators have traditionally focused on three aspects of the health care system - access, cost, and quality - they have neglected an arguably coequal fourth issue: equity in the distribution of health care costs and benefits. This brief introduction to a...

This paper develops a transaction cost economic model for regulation and applies the model to environmental siting regulations designed to overcome NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) political opposition. Negotiations between developers and resistant local communities to site waste facilities, such as...

For nearly one millennium, the diamond industry's distribution system remained largely unchanged. Ethnic networks, predominated by Jewish merchants, managed the downstream distribution system. Since state courts are unable to reliably enforce executory contracts for diamond sales, these networks...

This paper formulates a positive model that predicts when parties will employ private ordering to enforce their agreements. The typical enforcement mechanism associated with private ordering is the reputation mechanism, when a merchant community punishes parties in breach of contract by denying...

This paper addresses the contradictory results obtained by Segal (1997) and Spiller & Gely (1992) concerning the impact of institutional constraints on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision making. By adapting the Spiller & Gely maximum likelihood model to the Segal dataset, we find support for the...

This Essay formulates a positive model that predicts when commercial parties will employ private ordering to enforce their agreements. The typical enforcement mechanism associated with private ordering is the reputation mechanism, in which a merchant community punishes parties in breach of...