We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how, after a history of decay, cooperation in a repeated voluntary contribution game can be revived in an enduring way. Simply starting the repeated game over - a simple fresh start - leads to an initial increase of cooperation, but to a subsequent new...

In most firms, managers periodically assess workers performance. Evidence suggests that managers with hold information during these reviews, and some observers argue that this necessarily reduces surplus. This paper assesses the validity of this argument when workers have career concerns....

We show that in business groups with efficient internal capital markets resources may be channelled to either more or less profitable units. Depending on the amount of internal resources, a group may exit a market in response to increased competition, or channel funds to the subsidiary operating...

I analyze the basis of the market economy in classical Rome, from the perspective of personal-versus-impersonal exchange and focusing on the role of the state in providing market-enabling institutions. I start by reviewing the central conflict in all exchanges between those holding and those...

I provide a justification of intellectual property rights as a source of static efficiency gains in manufacturing, rather than dynamic benefits from greater innovation. I develop a property-rights model of a supply relationship with two dimensions of non-contractible investment. In equilibrium,...

We study optimal contracts in a simple model where employees are averse to inequity as modelled by Fehr and Schmidt (1999). A selfish employer can profitably exploit envy or guilt by offering contracts which create inequity off-equilibrium, i.e., when employees do not meet his demands. Such...

This chapter proposes two hypotheses on the publicity requirement and the limitations of possession to provide information for legal titling. It then tests these hypotheses by examining how legal systems deal with possession in movable and immovable property, and comparing actual and documentary...

This article develops two hypotheses about economically-relevant values of Christian believers, according to which Protestants should work more and more effectively, as in the work ethic argument of Max Weber, or display a stronger social ethic that would lead them to monitor each others...

Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (1960), most economic analyses of property rights disregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide to rightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers in terms of information...

Previous analysis has shown that traders may opt for specific technologies with no joint productivity advantage as a way to commit themselves to trading jointly, but only when long-term contracting is infeasible. This paper proves that specificity can also be optimal (by relaxing the...