A version of the Second Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics that applies to a money-free environment, in which a set of indivisible goods needs to be matched to some set of agents, is established. In such environments, 'trade' can be identified with the set of hierarchical exchange...

Im folgenden wird zunächst an einem konkreten Beispiel illustriert, worin die Pointe der 'institutionellen Ergonomie' liegt. Anschließend wird das Gemeingutdilemma als ein wichtiges Problem für institutionelles Design vorgestellt. Anhand dieses Beispielproblems sollen dann alle weiteren...

Zunehmend erfährt die auf den Annahmen der neoklassischen Ökonomie ruhende Analyse des Rechts Kritik und Konkurrenz durch andere sozialwissenschaftliche Disziplinen. Die vorderste Front bilden dabei die klassischen Verhaltenswissenschaften, insbesondere die kognitive Psychologie. Ihre Kritik...

The explicit or implicit protection of banks through government bail-out policies is a universal phenomenon. We analyze the competitive effects of such policies in two models with different degrees of transparency in the banking sector. Our main result is that the bail-out policy unambiguously...

Simon's (1955) famous paper was one of the first to cast doubt on the validity of rational choice theory; it has been supplemented by many more papers in the last three and a half decades. Nevertheless, rational choice theory plays a crucial role in classical and neoclassical economic theory,...

The law is not a bunch of scattered rules, it is a body. This simple statement suffices to demonstrate that consistency is crucial for the law. Esteemed philosophers radicalise the statement: If it stops being consistent, to them the law is no longer the law. Consequently, consistency must be an...

Competition between parallel infrastructures incorporates opposing welfare effects. The gain from reduced deadweight loss might be out- weighed by the inefficient duplication of an existing infrastructure. Using data from broadband internet access for Western Europe 2000-2004, this paper...