Imposing liability on a company for sexual harassment by supervisors cannot be justified as promoting equality between the sexes, protection of workers, or protection of the owners of the company. Such liability might be justified to prevent breach of contract or behavior offensive to the...

In this paper we explain the prevalence of explicit contracts of employment, particularly those that embody high- rather than low-powered incentives and clauses that supersede the common law defaults. Our analysis is based on an understanding of two fundamental problems that arise when agency...

The purpose of this paper is to show that the common law governing the employment of labor makes the distinction not only between employee and independent contractor but also between managerial control and agency. The idea is that common law precedents govern workers who are employed and...

This paper develops a model of pricing and advertising in a matching environment with capacity constrained sellers. Sellers' expenditure on directly informative advertising attracts consumers only probabilistically. Consumers who happen to observe advertisements randomize over the advertised...

When potential shareholders cannot observe the business conditions of the firms, the latter desiring to acquire capital by an IPO and operating under less favourable business conditions have a strong incentive to appear more successful.

This paper studies the international portfolio flows of US investors to examine the information structure of international equity markets. We use an empirical model of portfolio flows with both public and private information to extract measures of trades due to private information. We find that...

This paper reports experimental evidence on behaviour in an Ultimatum Game where responders have low structural information and feedback so that they have to learn the nature of the game during repeated play. The results lend support to the view that certain learning conditions are less...

One of the most striking results in experimental economics is the ease with which market bubbles form in a laboratory setting and the difficulty of preventing them. This article re-examines bubble experiments in light of the results of an earlier series of market experiments that examine how...

This is a short literature overview. (1) The literature demonstrates no coherent view on the nature of economic exchange and, in particular, provides no conventionally accepted, fully satisfactory explanation of the real effects of money. Recent developments in macroeconomics suggest a role for...

In a world with private information about the quality of technology we find that there are situations where relatively more technologically superior firm will license its technology but relatively less technologically superior firm will not license its technology. This finding is opposite to the...