I examine the case where fulfillment of a contractual commitment is only imperfectly verifiable and ask whether the court should then "tell the truth"" regarding the action in dispute. I show that truth seeking does not maximize the expected surplus from contractual relationships. From the...

This paper analyzes the incentive properties of the standard and burden of proof for a finding of negligence, when evidence about injurers' behavior is imperfect and rests with the parties. We show that the `preponderance of evidence' standard used in common law, together with ordinary exclusion...

There is a long history of models attempting to identify the causes of corruption, yet empirical analysis is complicated. Not only is data difficult to obtain and often available only for few countries and a limited number of years, but such estimation involves inherent complexities. This paper...

We argue that the common law standard of proof, given the rules of evidence, does not minimize expected error as usually argued in the legal literature, but may well be efficient from the standpoint of providing maximal incentives for socially desirable behavior. By contrast, civil law's higher...

This paper makes an attempt at testing the external validity of corruption experiments by moving from the lab in a developed country, to where it matters the most, the field in a developing country. In our experiment a candidate proposes a bribe to a grader in order to obtain a better grade. We...

Two firms produce a good with a horizontal and a vertical characteristic called quality. The difference in the unobservable quality levels determines how the firms share the market. We consider two scenarios: In the first one, firms disclose quality; in the second one, they send costly signals...

We analyze optimal trading mechanisms in environments where each trader owns some units of a good to be traded and may be either a seller or a buyer, depending on the realization of privately observed valuations. First, the concept of virtual valuation is extended to ex ante unidentified...

This paper examines how different rules for presentation of evidence affect verdicts in regulatory hearings and the welfare and efficiency properties these procedures exhibit. The hearing is modeled as a game of imperfect information in which the respondent is privately informed about validity...

Our objective in this paper is to illustrate and better understand the unavoidable arbitrage between incentives and flexibility in contexts of asymmetric information and to characterize the general features of an appropriate response to this challenge. We show that procedures and institutions in...