We study a model of civil dispute with delegation in which a plaintiff's lawyer works on a contingent fee basis but a defendant's lawyer on an hourly fee basis. We first derive the conditions under which delegation to the lawyers brings both the plaintiff and defendant more payoffs, compared to...

This paper formulates a model of dynamic, endogenous reform of political institutions. Specifically, a class of dynamic political games (DPGs) is introduced in which institutional choice is both recursive and instrumental. It is recursive because future political institutions are decided under...

In its standard “public choice” form, the mechanism-design framework abstracts from institutional and technological constraints beyond those that the modeler can represent in the definition of states, outcomes, and preferences. This abstraction can create a useful simplification. However,...

We conduct an event analysis on OPEC quota announcements to determine their impact on the stock returns in the oil industry. We find that announcements to reduce the quota are followed by positive excess returns over pre-announcement levels, announcements of no action are met with negative...

We investigate the implications of two properties, sustainability and exemption, when imposed separately in conjunction with other basic properties for the resolution of conflicting claims. Under the protective properties, agents with sufficiently small claims in relation to the others are fully...

In this paper, we show that when the government is able to transfer wealth between generations, regressive policies are no longer optimal. The optimal educational policy can be decentralized through appropriate Pigouvian taxes and credit provision, is not regressive, and provides equality of...

Self regulation is a mechanism of quality vigilance that is frequently used in credence good industries. The providers in these markets generally form a Self Regulated Organization (SRO), composed by some members of the industry, whose main job is to convince consumers through an active...

Dow and Welang (1994) extended the notion of Nash equilibrium for two-player finite normal games when players are uncertainty on the behavior of his opponents. They showed the existence of equilibrium for any given degree of uncertainty however constant over all possible events, except the null...

This paper analyzes a stochastic model of evolution in normal form games. The long-run behavior of individuals in this model is investigated in the limit where mutation rates tend to zero, while the expected number of mutations, and hence population sizes, tend to infinity. It is shown that...