We investigate the terms of exchange between the legislative branch of the government and an administrative bureau with standard operating procedures. An administrative bureau is a not-for-profit public organisation responsible for the production of a non-marketable good. Such a bureau is...

The 'ratchet effect' refers to a situation where a principal uses private information that is revealed by an agent's early actions to the agent's later disadvantage, in a context where binding multi-period contracts are not enforceable. In a simple, context-rich environment, we experimentally...

Many models in the economics literature deal with strategic situations with privately informed agents. In those models the information structure is assumed to be exogenous and common knowledge. We consider whether such models, and the results they produce, are robust with respect the...

Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgement; under conditional fees the lawyer gets an upscale premium if the case is won which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a framework where lawyers are uninformed about the...

We consider resource allocation within an organisation when agents have a preference for autonomy and show how delegation bears on moral hazard and adverse selection. Agents may care about autonomy for reasons of job-satisfaction, status or greater reputation of perform-ance under autonomy....

A social choice function is robustly implemented if every equilibrium on every type space achieves outcomes consistent with it. We identify a robust monotonicity condition that is necessary and (with mild extra assumptions) sufficient for robust implementation. Robust monotonicity is strictly...

In a general interdependent preference environment, we characterize when two payoff types can be distinguished by their rationalizable strategic choices without any prior knowledge of their beliefs and higher order beliefs. We show that two types are strategically distinguishable if and only if...

A social choice function is robustly implementable if there is a mechanism under which the process of iteratively eliminating strictly dominated messages leads to outcomes that agree with the social choice at every type profile. In an interdependent value environment with single crossing...

Information regarding economic fundamentals is widely dispersed in society, is only imperfectly aggregated through prices or other indicators of aggregate activity, and can not be centralized by the government or any other institution. In this paper we seek to identify policies that can improve...