What is the best way to reward innovation? While prizes avoid deadweight loss, intellectual property screens out projects generating low consumer surplus per unit sold. We build a model that formalizes this trade-off and develop tools for solving the resulting multidimensional screening problem....

The Kyoto and Copenhagen Protocols on climate change mitigation postponed the specification of binding commitments to a future negotiation. This paper analyzes the strategic implications of delayed negotiations. While, as iswell-understood, the incentive to free ride leads to excessive emissions...

Classic analyses of sovereign debt make no predictions concerning the allocation of risk between the market and the official sector or among official sector creditors. To open the black box of the composition of a sovereign's foreign liabilities, this paper develops a new framework and...

The paper makes two related contributions. First, and in contrast with the rich body of literature on collusion with (mainly perfect) substitutes, it derives general results on the sustainability of tacit coordination for a class of nested demand functions that allows for the full range between...

The paper revisits and qualifies existing insights on security design. A rich literature argues that tranching creates debt-like instruments that are robust to adverse selection or discourage wasteful information acquisition. Yet, for a given information structure, while tranching confines and...