How much information does an auctioneer want bidders to have in a private value environment? We address this question using a novel approach to ordering information structures based on the property that in private value settings more information leads to a more disperse distribution of buyers’...

This paper analyzes the current trend towards firms’ self-regulation as opposed to the formal regulation of a negative externality. Firms respond to increasing activism in the market(conscious consumers that take into account the external effects of their purchase) by providing more socially...

Many of the attributes that make a good "socially responsible" are credence attributes that cannot be learned by consumers either through search or experience. Consumers aggregate information about them from several channels (media, advertisement, NGOs, etc.). Since these sources may send...

The paper deals with a bilateral accident situation in which victims have heterogeneous costs of care. With perfect information,efficient care by the injurer raises with the victim's cost. When the injurer cannot observe at all the victim's type, and this fact can be verified by Courts,...

It is commonly argued that in recent years pharmaceutical companies have directed their R&D towards small improvements of existing compounds instead of more risky drastic innovations. In this paper we show that the proliferation of these small innovations is likely to be linked to the lack of...

El objetivo de este trabajo es discutir y analizar el concepto de la responsabilidad social corporativa (RSC) desde la teoria económica. Para ello usamos un modelo sencillo que nos permite clarificar algunos aspectos del debate que rodea la RSC. Observamos como la motivación subyacente en las...

We analyze the impact of different types of international conventions that require signatory countries to penalize domestic firms that are found to have bribed foreign public officials. We analyze enforcement of penalties under a convention styled after the OECD's 'Convention on Combating...

We study the standard economic model of unilateral accidents, in its simplest form, assuming that the injurers have limited assets.We identify a second-best optimal rule that selects as due care the minimum of first-best care, and a level of care that takes into account the wealth of the...

Most cases of cost overruns in public procurement are related to important changes in the initial project design. This paper deals with the problem of design speciffication in public procurement and provides a rationale for design misspeciffication. We propose a model in which the sponsor...

We study a situation in which an auctioneer wishes to sell an object to one of N risk-neutral bidders with heterogeneous preferences. The auctioneer does not know bidders’ preferences but has private information about the characteristics of the ob ject, and must decide how much information to...