In 1873, Denmark, Norway and Sweden formed the Scandinavian Currency Union (SCU) and adopted the gold standard. The Union worked fairly smoothly during the next thirty years and was partly extended until 1914. The outbreak of World War I triggered a series of events that eventually would lead to...

I develop a model of public sector contracting based on the multitask framework by Holmström and Milgrom (1991). In this model, an agent can put effort into increasing the quality of a service or reducing costs. Being residual claimants, private owners have stronger incentives to cut costs than...

We model organizational decision making as costless pre-play communication. Decision making is called authoritarian if only one player is allowed to speak and consensual if all players are allowed to speak. Players are assumed to have limited cognitive capacity and we characterize their behavior...

The paper analyses how cooperation in a repeated social game may help to sustain cooperation in a "linked" repeated production game. We show that this may happen a)because of available "social capital", defined as the slack of punishment power present in the social repeated game, b) because,...

If contracting within the firm is incomplete, managers will expend resources on trying to appropriate a share of the surplus that is generated. We show that outside ownership may alleviate the deadweight losses associated with such costly distributional conflict, even if all it does is add...

A purchaser/provider split together with output- based reimbursement were recently introduced by several Swedish county councils. These changes have been motivated by arguments of efficiency and consumer choice. This paper tests the null hypothesis that hospital services are provided as...

This is a dictionary entry forthcoming in Peter Newman, ed. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, London: Macmillan, 1998.

A separation of provider and purchaser roles - together with performance-based reimbursement - were recently introduced in several county councils, which are the local governments that provide and fund almost all health care in Sweden. These changes have been motivated by efficiency and consumer...

We model networks of relational (or implicit)contracts, exploring how sanctioning power and equilibrium conditions change under different network configurations and information transmission technologies. In our model, relations are the links, and the value of the network lies in its ability to...

We suggest an operational definition of transaction cost as the expected value of strategy information in games played by individuals randomly matched from a large population. We relate the concept of a transaction cost minimum to those of Nash equilibrium, efficiency, and evolutionary...