The “mushroom treatment� is a common metaphor for the practice of “keeping employees in the dark and feeding them a steady diet of bull manure.� We develop a model of this practice of information suppression and misrepresentation within organizations,...

Two main results have been obtained on the literature on contractual solutions to the hold-up problem. First, a contract specifying a price and quantity of the final good to be traded will, fairly generally, induce efficient investments if these are `selfish' in nature, i.e., each party's...

Networks and Farsighted Stability By Frank H. Page, Jr. Department of Finance University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 USA fpage@cba.ua.edu Myrna H. Wooders Department of Economics University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL UK M.Wooders@warwick.ac.uk Samir Kamat Portfolio Management Group Wachovia...

In this paper we study hedonic games where each player views every other player either as a friend or as an enemy. Two simple priority criteria for comparison of coalitions are suggested, and the corresponding preference restrictions based on appreciation of friends and aversion to enemies are...

We examine in this paper the role of an economy's social interaction structure, defined as a graph. Individuals care about the decisions of their neighbors. We extend the behavioral discrete-response rules along the lines of the interactive discrete choice model of Brock and Durlauf (2001) to...

This paper characterizes optimal income tax and audit schemes in the presence of costly enforcement when the agent is risk averse and not necessarily risk neutral. It is shown that the results under risk-neutrality (Chander and Wilde (1998)) largely hold under risk aversion. We first show that...

We analyze the importance of information about individual skills for understanding economic growth and income inequality. The paper uses the framework of an OLG economy with endogenous investment in human capital. Agents in each generation differ by random individual ability, or talent, which...

We examine the impact of R&D intensity and agency costs on the value of firms across 13 economies. We find that R&D adds value while high agency costs reduce value. R&D adds value, however, even when agency costs are high. We show that in those firms where agency costs are high and R&D intensity...

Unexpected variation in emissions can have an enormous impact on the prices of emission permits and the efficiency achieved in tradable permit markets. Shocks to emission levels can be correlated across firms; for example, most firms require more emission permits than planned for following a...

This paper presents a participation game experiment to study the impact of uncertainty and costly political participation on the incidence of reform. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) show that uncertainty about who will ultimately gain or lose as a result of a reform can prevent its adoption. We...