We study the welfare economics of probabilistic patents that are licensed without a full determination of validity. We examine the social value of instead determining patent validity before licensing to downstream technology users, in terms of deadweight loss (ex post) and innovation incentives...

In many economic, political, and social situations, circumstances change at random points in time, reacting is costly, and reactions appropriate to present circumstances may become inappropriate upon future changes, requiring further costly reaction. Waiting is informative if arrival of the next...

This paper reports the results of an experiment on exclusive contracts. We replicate the strategic environment described by Rasmusen, Ramseyer, and Wiley (1991) and Segal and Whinston (2000). Our findings are as follows. First, when the buyers can communicate, discrimination raises the...

British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions....

This paper examines the efficiency of expectation damages as a breach remedy in a bilateral trade setting with renegotiation and relationship-specific investment by the buyer and the seller. As demonstrated by Edlin and Reichelstein (1996), no contract that specifies only a fixed quantity and a...

Insurers have the reputation of being bad payers who nitpick when- ever an opportunity arises. However, this nitpicking activity has a positive impact on their auditing strategy since auditing may prove profitable when claims are not fraudulent. We show that reducing the indemnity payments of...

Do intellectual property rights influence multinationals' manufacturing location decisions? My theoretical model indicates that countries with strong patent laws attract multinational activity, but only in sectors with relatively long product life cycles. By contrast, firms with short life-cycle...