This paper investigates some economic effects of recent amendments to the German Copyright Law on the German film industry. The changes assume the existence of a prevailing “structural superiority” of media companies over their contractual partners in labor markets which supposedly results...

Contract law's liquidated damage rules prevent enforcement of contractual damage measures that require the promisor, if it breaches, to transfer to the promisee a sum that exceeds the net gain the promisee expected to make from performance; but these rules permit the promisor to transfer less than...

In this paper, we prove that two firms can choose not to include a termination clause in their partnership contract, thus inducing a costly termination in case of failure of the joint project. This ex-post inefficiency induces partners to exert large non-contractible efforts (investments) to...

We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of...

This paper studies the ability of an agent and a principal to achieve the first-best outcome when the agent invests in an asset that has greater value if owned by the principal than by the agent. When contracts can be renegotiated, a well-known danger is that the principal can holdup the agent,...

Many couples do not sign prenuptial agreements, even though this often leads to costly and inefficient litigation in case of divorce. In this paper we show that strategic reasons may prevent agents from signing a prenuptial agreement. Partners which have high productivity in marital activities...

We examine how social preferences affect behavior and surplus in relational contracts. Experimental subjects participate in a contracting environment similar to Brown, Falk, and Fehr [Brown, M., Falk, A. & Fehr, E., “Relational Contracts and the Nature of Market Interactions, Econometrica, 72...

Agent-based computational economics (ACE) is the computational study of economies modelled as evolving decentralized systems of autonomous interacting agents. A key focus of ACE research is understanding how global regularities arise from the bottom up, through the repeated local interactions of...

Artificial life (alife) is the bottom-up study of basic phenomena commonly associated with living agents, such as self- replication, evolution, adaptation, self-organization, exploitation, competition, cooperation, and social network formation. Alife complements the traditional biological and...

I study equilibrium selection by an evolutionary process in an environment with multiple equilibria, one of which involves a banking panic. The analysis is built on a repeated version of the Diamod-Dybvig (1983) model. The optimal (run free) equilibrium is uniquely selected if it is also "risk...