If there is competition for access to an underpriced good such as a free parking spot, the competition can eat up the entire surplus, eliminating the social value of the good. There is a discontinuity in social welfare between “enough” and “not enough,” with the minimum social welfare...

Hart & Moore (1999) construct a model to show that contracts perform poorly in complex environments when the state of the world is unverifiable and renegotiation cannot be ruled out. They implicitly assume one player can extort payment from another by threatening to take an inefficient action...

Consider a Bertrand model in which each firm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active firms is uncertain. This activity level can be endogenized in several ways ---whether to incur a fixed cost of activity, for example, or what level of output to choose. Our model has a...