Abstract Much real-world contracting involves finding new clauses to add to a basic agreement, clauses which may or may not increase the welfare of both parties. The parties must decide which complications to propose, how closely to examine the other side's proposals, and whether to accept them....

A rational bidder in a private-value auction should be reluctant to incur the cost of perfectly estimating his value if it might not matter to the success of his bidding strategy. This can explain sniping---flurries of bids at the end of auctions---as the result of other bidders trying to avoid...

Eric Rasmusen presents a global warming research agenda for economists.

Come out, come out, wherever you are, says Eric Rasmusen.

Many observers suggest that American citizens sue more readily than citizens elsewhere, and that American judges shape society more powerfully than judges elsewhere. We examine the problems involved in exploring these questions quantitatively. The data themselves indicate that American law’s...

The Klein-Leffler model explains how the benefit of future reputation can induce firms to produce high quality experience goods, either in a monopoly or an industry with competing firms. We show that reputation can be leveraged across products, but only by a firm with a monopoly on at least one...

We show that if and only if a real-valued function f is strictly quasiconcave except possibly for a at interval at its maximum, and furthermore belongs to an explicitly determined regularity class, does there exist a strictly monotonically increasing function g such that g o f is strictly...

Using micro-level tax data on attorney incomes in 2004 (when the law was changed to make it confidential), we analyze the industrial organization of the Japanese bar. These data suggest two sources of high income: an idiosyncratic return to talent in Tokyo and a compensating differential for the...

Various corporations, profit and nonprofit, have sued to be exempted from abortion-related mandates of Obamacare because of religious objections. They have also asked for preliminary injunctions against government enforcement of the offending provisions until the merits are decided. This paper...

Bidders have to decide whether and when to incur the cost of estimating their own values in auctions. This can explain why people seem to get carried away, bidding higher than they had planned before the auction and then finding they had paid more than the object was worth to them. Even when...