degrees of credibility, in which commitment and discretion become special cases of what we call quasi commitment. The monetary … from commitment accrue at relatively low levels of credibility. In our benchmark calibration, a commitment expected to last … policy authority is assumed to formulate optimal commitment plans, to be tempted to renege on them, and to succumb to this …

are characterized by a fundamental inconsistency between formal and informal institutions. When formal and informal rules … the new institutional economics is on the consequences of institutions--the rules that structure and constrain economic …. Institutions therefore do affect economic performance, but it is not always obvious which institutional rules dominate. Where …

-announced schedule de facto acts as a commitment not to adjust in intermediate periods. We find that at short horizons gains from such … commitment outweigh welfare costs of central bank's inaction. Second, we solve for the optimal frequency of policy adjustment and …

¡°government-bank-firm¡±, we show that the government¡¯s non-commitment and banking bailout cause inefficiency in the contact … relationship. Moreover, after introducing collusion possibility, non-commitment of the government increases the stakes, or bribes … other equilibrium where she sticks to her commitment and excludes collusion from the contract relationship. Here, collusion …

We study the value of commitment in contests and tournaments when there are costs for the follower to observe the … itself. We show that this distinction matters significantly: When observation is costly, the value of commitment vanishes … tournaments, the value of commitment is preserved completely, provided that the observation costs are sufficiently small. …

. While temptation is commonly understood to give rise to a demand for commitment, it is shown that `temptation by future …

as a primitive and hypothesize that temptation creates a preference for commitment. This paper argues that temptation may … in fact create the absence of a preference for commitment, and that the primitive may not be empirically meaningful since …