This essay provides an overview of the central theoretical law and economics insights concerning antidiscrimination law across a variety of contexts including discrimination in labor markets, housing markets, consumer purchases, and policing. The different models of discrimination based on...

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) have been gaining increasing media and scholarly attention particularly due to their indispensable role in the wars in Afghanistan 2001 and Iraq 2003. Nevertheless, theoretical insights into the agency problems inherent when hiring PMSCs and how to...

Consider a situation in which a principal commits to a mechanism first and then agents choose unobservable actions before their payoff-relevant types are realized. The agents' actions may affect not only their payoffs directly but also the distribution of their types as well. This paper extends...

We examine a "Rotten Kid" model (Becker 1974) where a player with social preferences interacts with an egoistic player. We assume that social preferences are intention-based rather than outcome-based. In a very general multi-stage setting we show that any equilibrium must involve mutually unkind...

We study the effects of reputation and competition in a stylized market for experience goods. If interaction is anonymous, such markets perform poorly: sellers are not trustworthy, and buyers do not trust sellers. If sellers are identifiable and can, hence, build a reputation, efficiency...

Does improving creditor coordination by strengthening CACs lead to efficiency gains in the functioning of sovereign bond markets? We address this question in a model featuring both debtor moral hazard and creditor coordination under incomplete information. Conditional on default, we characterize...

We study a combinatorial variant of the classical principal-agent model. In our setting a principal wishes to incentivize a team of strategic agents to exert costly effort on his behalf. Agentsʼ actions are hidden and the principal observes only the outcome of the team, which depends...

We study the effects of reputation and competition in a trust game. If trustees are anonymous, outcomes are poor: trustees are not trustworthy, and trustors do not trust. If trustees are identifiable and can, hence, build a reputation, efficiency quadruples but is still at only a third of the...

A standard tournament contract specifies only tournament prizes. If agents’ performance is measured on a cardinal scale, the principal can complement the tournament contract by a gap which defines the minimum distance by which the best performing agent must beat the second best to receive the...