The revenue-equivalence theorm for auctions predicts that expected seller revenue is independent of the bidding rules, as long as equilibrium has the properties that the buyer with the highest reservation price wins and any buyer with the lowest possible reservation price has zero expected...

This paper characterizes the choice rules that can be implemented when agents are unable to commit themselves not to renegotiate the mechanism. Copyright 1999 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

There is a voluminous theoretical literature on sealed high-bid auctions (auctions in which bids are sealed and the high bidder pays his bid). See for example, Vickrey (1961), Myerson (1981), Riley and Samuelson (1981), Milgrom and Weber (1982), Mathews (1983), Maskin and Riley (1984),...

We model an organization as a hierarchy of managers erected on top of a technology (here consisting of a collection of plants). In our framework, the role of a manager is to take steps to reduce the adverse consequences of shocks that affect the plants beneath him. We argue that different...

The authors scrutinize the conceptual framework commonly used in the incomplete contract literature. This literature usually assumes that contractual incompleteness is due to the transaction costs of describing--or of even foreseeing--the possible states of nature in advance. They argue,...

The authors first point out that the recent property-rights literature is based on three assumptions: (1) that contracts are always subject to renegotiation; (2) that the exercise of a property right confers a private benefit and (3) that parties are risk-neutral. Building on Hart-Moore (1999),...