The challenge to manage the allocation of water efficiently and equably will become a dominant theme of the new millennium. At a time when the cost of obtaining fresh water is rising throughout the globe, Terence Lee analyses the means for establishing and operating effective water markets. He...

Deregulation and its Discontents examines the different ways in which the issues related to deregulation and reregulation have been addressed in Asia. The role of government in business has gone through distinct, if overlapping, cycles: regulation, deregulation and reregulation. However, little...

Worldwide, postal and delivery economics has attracted considerable interest. Numerous questions have arisen, including the role of regulation, funding the Universal Service Obligation, postal reform in Europe, Asia and North America, the future of national postal operators, demand and pricing...

1. The failure of good intentions : the collapse of American telecommunications after six years of Deregulation -- 2. Road networks : efficiency, externalities and consumer choice -- 3. The Enterprise Act : pluses and minuses for competition policy -- 4. Ofcom and light touch regulation -- 5....

We develop a theory of firm scope in which integrating two firms into one facilitates the allocation of resources, but leads to weaker incentives for effort, compared with nonintegration. Our theory makes minimal assumptions about the underlying agency problem. Moreover, the benefits and costs...

We show experimentally that a principal’s distrust in the voluntary performance of an agent has a negative impact on the agent’s motivation to perform well. Before the agent chooses his performance, the principal in our experiment decides whether he wants to restrict the agents’ choice set...

We discuss a principal-agent model in which the principal has the opportunity to include a non-compete agreement in the employment contract. We show that not imposing such an agreement can be beneficial for the principal as the possibility to leave the firm generates implicit incentives for the...

In this paper, we discuss recent evidence from economic experiments that study the impact of social preferences on workplace behavior. We focus on situations in which a single employer interacts with multiple employees. Traditionally, equity and efficiency have been seen as opposing aims in such...

We analyze the Moral Hazard problem, assuming that agents are inequity averse. Our results differ from conventional contract theory and are more in line with empirical findings than standard results. We find: First, inequity aversion alters the structure of optimal contracts. Second, there is a...