This paper analyses principal-agent contracts when the agent`s action generates information not directly verifiable but used by the agent to make a risky decision. It considers a more general formulation than those studied previously, focusing on the impact on the decision made and the contract...

This paper studies a game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits whose risky arm might yield a payoff only after some exponentially distributed random time. Because of free-riding, there is an inefficiently low level of experimentation in any equilibrium where the players use...

This paper presents a pairwise matching model with two-sided information asymmetry to analyse the impact of information costs on endogenous network building and matching by information intermedairies. The framework innovates by examining the role of information costs on incentives for trade...

Centralized markets with large numbers of buyers and sellers are generally thought of as being competitive and well-functioning. However, an important role of centralized markets is matching heterogeneous products, such as fish, to buyers of these products. The high level of differentiation in...

A two-sided, pair-wise matching model is developed to analyse the strategic interaction between two information intermediaries who compete in commission rates and network size, giving rise to a fragmented duopoly market structure. The model suggests that network competition between information...

This paper analyses market valuations of UK companies using a new data set of their R&D and IP activities (1989-1999). In contrast to previous studies, the analysis is conducted at the sector level, where the sectors are based on the technological classification in Pavitt (1984). The first main...

Reducing fixed cost duplication - a common justification for concentrated market structure - motivated the US government to relax the number of radio stations a firm could operate in any local market.  After deregulation the number of firms per market decreased.  The implied cost saving...

The UK`s business R&D (BERD) to GDP ratio is low compared to other leading economies, and the ratio has slowly declined over the 1990s. This paper uses data on large UK firms to analyse the link between R&D and productivity over the 1989-2000 period. Using a production function approach, and a...

Several papers have argued that firms can hide profits from unions with hard debt commitments. Alternatively, here we argue that unions can manipulate the non-shirking constraint and win higher efficiency wages. By creating a culture of mistrust and an opposition to supervision ex ante, unions...