Multiple empirical studies find that juries/courts take account of potential harm in the determination of punitive damages. The received view in economic theory, however, is that punitive damages should not depend on potential harm. The purpose of this note is to provide an efficiency rationale...

Use of public humiliation as a deterrent to crime has a long history as does the debate over its effectiveness. A recent rule change in college football presents a natural experiment to test the effectiveness of so-called shaming penalties. In 2004 the National Collegiate Athletic Association...

This paper analyzes a mixed duopoly in which a public firm and a (possibly partially) foreign-owned firm choose their capacity scales before competing in quantities. We show that the private firm chooses over-capacity, as in previous literature, except if it is completely foreign-owned. In this...

This paper analyzes mergers incentives in an asymmetric mixed oligopoly consisting of two identical private firms and one public firm. It is shown that when there is a technological gap between the public and private firms, both of them will want to merge when the public firm is inefficient and...

I investigate an innovative interaction before a market competition in a mixed duopoly, where a state-owned firm and a private firm compete with each other. I find that although it reduces the effort level of the state-owned firm, an agency problem can improve the expected social welfare in some...

We analyze sequential and simultaneous price setting under a mixed duopoly with homogeneous products and symmetric quadratic cost functions. When public firm is the follower, there exists the case that the equilibrium price is highest of all timings.

The paper considers a cost-reducing investment by the public sector. We compare the investment in the public monopoly to that in the mixed oligopoly. Without specifications of the demand and cost functions, we show that the investment in the public monopoly is higher thanthat in the mixed...

It has long been argued that faith-inspired health facilities serve the poor in priority in sub-Saharan Africa, in part by being located in remote and poor areas where the reach of government services may remain limited. Unfortunately, proper empirical evidence to back up such claims is rarely...

In a mixed oligopoly, when the public leader becomes a private leader and the government provides output subsidies, then privatization causes the optimal subsidy, profits and welfare to fall [Economics Letters 83 (2004) 411]. We show instead that if the leader and the followers receive...

This study aims to investigate the impact of privatization on the degree of cooperation and competition in a mixed duopoly market. In this market, one semipublic firm and one private firm determine the level of two types of effort: the cooperative effort made to enlarge the total market size and...