This paper studies the ability of an agent and a principal to achieve the first-best outcome when the agent invests in an asset that has greater value if owned by the principal than by the agent. When contracts can be renegotiated, a well-known danger is that the principal can holdup the agent,...

Market gardening has been increasing fast in Senegal. But farmers face high marketing risks: daily price fluctuations exceed an average 20% for some products, seasonality is strong, anticipation based on prices leads to cyclic movements. Farmers and market operators have found various forms of...

We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of...

We examine how social preferences affect behavior and surplus in relational contracts. Experimental subjects participate in a contracting environment similar to Brown, Falk, and Fehr [Brown, M., Falk, A. & Fehr, E., “Relational Contracts and the Nature of Market Interactions, Econometrica, 72...

Undesirable outputs are often produced together with desirable outputs. This joint production of good and bad outputs brings about a difficulty for productivity measurement. Here we introduce a directional distance function and use it as a component in a new productivity index. This index, as an...

Reply to professor Vanek's comment on Bogetic's paper in the same issue of the Economic Analysis and Workers' Management.

I show that the Pigovian solution to a simple externalities problem and a particular Coasian solution can be viewed as competitive equilibria from different initial endowments. I also describe the ``compensation mechanism,'' a mechanism that implements either the Coasian or Pigovian solution as...

This paper studies efficient and egalitarian allocations over a single heterogeneous and infinitely divisible good. We prove the existence of such allocations using only measure-theoretic arguments. Under the additional assumption of complete information, we identify a sufficient condition on...

We analyze three sets of income data: the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). It is shown that the empirical income distribution is consistent with a two-parameter lognormal function for the low-middle...

Models of household consumption used to estimate the relative needs of people living in different family types need to take account of economies of household size, price-like substitution effects and the allocation of consumption among the individuals of the household. No existing estimation...