Sharing a damage that has been caused jointly by several individuals - called tortfeasors - is a difficult problem that courts often face. Even if there are basic principles and rules to apportion damages among them, legal scholars are still looking for a systematic apportionment method. We...

The plea bargaining procedure, namely the viability of a stage of bargaining between prosecutor and defendant in criminal suits, is analyzed in the framework of a two-sided incomlete information game.

Since the introduction of a formal commitments procedure in EU an- titrust policy (Article 9 of Council Regulation 1/2003), the European Commission has extensively settled cases of alleged anticompetitive practices. In this paper, we use a formal model of law enforcement (Be- bchuk, 1984; Shavell,...

Individuals exchange contracts for the delivery of commodities in competitive markets and, simultaneously, act strategically; actions affect utilities across individuals directly or through the payoffs of contracts. This encompasses economies with asymmetric information, Nash-Walras equilibria...

We study a general model of common-value second-price auctions with differential information. We show that one of the bidders has an inform tion advantage over the other bidders if and only if he possesses dominantstrategy. A dominant strategy is in fact unique and is given by the conditional...

I develop a model of stochastic costly signaling in the presence of exogenous imperfect information, and study whether equilibrium signaling decreases ('information substitutes') or increases ('information complements') if the accuracy of exogenous information increases. A stochastic pure costly...

Social status, or prestige, is an important motive for buying art or collectibles and for participation in charity auctions. We study a symmetric private value auction with prestige motives, in which the auction outcome is used by an outside observer to infer the bidders’ types. We elicit...

We study a general model of common-value second-price auctions with differential information. We show that one of the bidders has an information advantage over the other bidders if and only if he possesses a dominant strategy. A dominant strategy is, in fact, unique, and is given by the...

I consider a two period model with an incumbent firm and a potential entrant each of whom produces a homogeneous good. There is a demand uncertainty and the information regarding the demand is asymmetric: the incumbent possesses private information concerning the state of demand while the...

In this paper we consider the problem of financing infrastructure when the regulator faces a budget constraint. The optimal budget-constrained mechanism satisfies four properties. The first property is bunching at the top, that is the more efficient firms produce the same quantity irrespective...