We consider a principal-multiagent framework with adverse selection when contracting is possible ex ante. However, enforcement of contracts is imperfect, which results in inefficiencies. We study how group contracting may or may not mitigate those inefficiencies.

We present a game-theoretic model of political discourse that explores how strategic incentives to make potentially persuasive arguments vary across different informational contexts. We show that political sophistication of the listeners fundamentally affects the speakers' incentives to make...

In this paper we primarily address the implications of the tort of defamation for the potential "chilling" effect by which the media are discouraged from exposing economic and political misdeeds. We argue that, in general, both the sanction for dishonesty and the compensation for defamation...

A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we construct a simple political-economy model that suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it...

Most moral justifications for coercion have been based on one of two arguments: the consent of the coerced, usually understood as univariate and discrete, or the beneficial consequences of coercion; but many cases do not fit these categories. This paper proposes that consent be understood as our...

Within the framework of the generalized Wittman-Roemer model of political competition, this article provides a canonical example showing that political parties may matter in explaining how redistribution policies change with respect to changes in inequality. Some authors (Lee and Roemer, 2005;...

This paper analyzes the efficient use of information in an agency relationship with moral hazard, when parties are risk-neutral. We show that, given an arbitrary information system, all relevant information from a mechanism-design point of view can be summarized by a binary statistic. We then...

The information created and disseminated through the litigation process can have social value. Suppose a long-lived plaintiff is suing a defendant for damages sustained in an accident. The plaintiff may suffer similar damages in future accidents involving different defendants. Potential injurers...

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...

After discussing some categories and modalities of a designed system change the paper turns to the example of the recent Russian company legislation. The design of two ambitious new company codes for large and small corporations implied a massive transformation of both the underlying economic...