A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

In economic approaches it is often argued that reputation considerations influence the behavior of individuals or firms and that reputation influences the outcome of markets. Empirical evidence is rare though. In this contribution we argue that a positive reputation of sellers should have an...

In a general setting of private information, the possibility (impossibility) theorem is said to be valid, if a balanced and ex post efficient mechanism exists (does not exist) which agents voluntarily participate at. Possibility and impossibility results are called robust if they hold for all...

We present a general equilibrium model of imperfect competition to analyze different policy measures in transition economies. Due to strategic complementarities in technology choice and demand spillovers, the possibility of multiple macroeconomic equilibria arises. Those equilibria can be...

In this note we consider the problem whether contingent commodity allocations can be used when the states are not directly contractible. In such a setting a contingent commodity allocation takes the form of a social choice function, and the question is whether this function is implementable (in...

The study of evolutionary dynamics was so far mainly restricted to finite strategy spaces. In this paper we show that this unsatisfying restriction is unnecessary. We specify a simple condition under which the continuous time replicator dynamics are well defined for the case of infinte strategy...

The paper develops a theoretical framework for studying conspicuous consumption. This is modeled as a device that signals the consumer's social status. Status is some function of the individual's rank in the wealth hierarchy. This approach makes it possible to distinguish between snob and...

This article studies the long-run direction of technological change in an endogenous growth model. Development is modeled as a sequence of temporary equilibria in an overlapping generations framework. We introduce a concept of `long-run efficient development' which excludes persistent...

We present a model where a government chooses the number of individuals to which ownership in a former state-owned firm shall be allocated. When making this decision the government maximizes the political support it gets from the firm's incumbent manager and from potential shareholders,...

This paper examines strategic trade policy with unilateral intervention under asymmetric information about market demand. In an international Cournot-duopoly, the choice of the domestic country's export subsidy signals the domestic country's private information to the foreign firm. It is shown...