This is an Invited paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and "standard" economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can provide useful arguments and insights in a...

Collusion and soft budget constraint are two conspicuous phenomena in transition economies¡¯ banking system. Literature has separately investigated those two phenomena from theoretical point of views. However, the cross-point of both phenomena has been neglected in the research of banking...

The article provides a fresh look at employee ownership as a method of privatization and discusses theoretical and incentives effects and recent experiences in Eastern and Central Europe.

Some institutional structures for inquiry produce better approximations to truth than others. The current institutional structure of police forensics gives each lab a monopoly in the analysis of the police evidence it receives. Forensic workers have inadequate incentives to produce reliable...

Casino gambling is a social issue, because in addition to the direct benefits to those who own and use casinos, positive and negative externalities are reaped and borne by those who do not gamble. To correctly assess the total economic impact of casinos, one must distinguish between business...

A convicted criminal suffers not only from public penalties, but from stigma, the reluctance of others to interact with him economically and socially. Conviction can convey useful information about a person, which makes stigmatization an important and legitimate function of the criminal justice...

Scientific and technological collaboration is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher...

The economic analysis of law, as a subdiscipline of economics, has traditionally been about analyzing the efficiency properties of different rules for assigning known quanta of damages. This work (from the author's NYU doctoral dissertation) focuses on the processes by which agents in legal...

The Electricity Bill, 2003 passed by Parliament promises to usher in sweeping changes. The Bill seeks to provide a legal framework for enabling reforms and restructuring of the power sector. It simplifies administrative procedures by integrating the Indian Electricity Act, 1910, the Electricity...