I examine the case where fulfillment of a contractual commitment is only imperfectly verifiable and ask whether the court should then "tell the truth"" regarding the action in dispute. I show that truth seeking does not maximize the expected surplus from contractual relationships. From the...

We consider the cost of providing incentives through tournaments when workers are inequity averse and performance evaluation is costly. The principal never benefits from empathy between the workers, but he may benefit from their propensity for envy depending on the costs of assessing...

We compare the wage costs of providing incentives through group versus individual bonus schemes. When workers are envious, either scheme may be the least cost one owing to the trade-off between the dissatisfaction with the prospect of unequal pay and the incentives it generates Nous comparons...

This paper analyzes the incentive properties of the standard and burden of proof for a finding of negligence, when evidence about injurers' behavior is imperfect and rests with the parties. We show that the `preponderance of evidence' standard used in common law, together with ordinary exclusion...

The paper reports on an experiment testing whether agents perceive correctly the lethal risks they face personally. The results suggest that subjects exhibit comparable biases when making predictions for their own-age-cohort, or for the entire population (i.e. agents overestimate rare risks, and...

We argue that the common law standard of proof, given the rules of evidence, does not minimize expected error as usually argued in the legal literature, but may well be efficient from the standpoint of providing maximal incentives for socially desirable behavior. By contrast, civil law's higher...

This paper develops a general stochastic framework and an equilibrium asset pricing model that make clear how attitudes towards intertemporal substitution and risk matter for option pricing. In particular, we show under which statistical conditions option pricing formulas are not...

In this paper, we analyze hyper-return periods from 1976 to 1994 for 20 emerging stock markets. We define a hyper-return period as a calendar year during which a cumulative geometric return in excess of 70% is observed. According to this definition, the hyper-return periods represent 23% of the...

This paper assesses the empirical performance of an intertemporal option pricing model with latent variables which generalizes the Hull-White stochastic volatility formula. Using this generalized formula in an ad-hoc fashion to extract two implicit parameters and forecast next day S&P 500 option...

Dans cet article, nous proposons des tests sur la forme de la distribution des erreurs dans un modèle de régression linéaire multivarié (RLM). Les tests que nous développons sont fonction des résidus obtenus par moindres carrés multivariés, lesquels sont standardisés de façon à ce que...