We focus in this paper on the effects of court errors on the optimal sharing of liability between firms and financiers, as an environmental policy instrument. Using a structural model of the interactions between firms, financial institutions, governments and courts we show, through numerical...

This paper analyzes liability issues in the context of internationally traded goods like hazardous waste. If waste disposers of a small open economy are judgement-proof, then the extension of liability to waste exporters distorts the factor allocation and may reduce disposal care. Hence the...

The 2002 prices of suppliers in German call-by-call telephone market are rather dispersed, out-of-phase (uncorrelated), and show systematic down-up movements. In 2004, these prices are less dispersed, more in-phase and show more upwards runs than downs-ups. In both years, we clearly do not...

Models to the issue of altruism which rely on externalities of well-being are rarely used explicitly. In this paper we compare such utility-based approaches with the standard approach on altruism which is based on externalities of income. Testable differences of both types of models are derived...

Firms signal high quality through high prices even if the market structure is highly competitive and price competition is severe. In a symmetric Bertrand oligopoly where products may differ only in their quality, production cost is increasing in quality and the quality of each firm’s product...

This article considers an asymmetric contest with incomplete information. There are two types of players: informed and uninformed. Each player has a different ability to translate effort into performance in terms of the contest success function. While one player's type is known to both players,...

Numerous laboratory experiments show that workers reciprocate to high wages with high effort, when there is perfect information on the surplus created. Recent field experiments, however, suggest that trust and reciprocity may be lower or absent when the information is incomplete. We report a...

I consider a model in which an asset owner must decide how much to invest in his asset mindful of the fact that an encroacher's valuation of the asset is increasing in the asset owner's investment. Due to incomplete property rights, the encroacher and asset owner engage in a contest over the...

We consider an economic model of child development with multiple stages. Due to incomplete information, parents are not able to tailor their investments to their child's type when the child is young. We show that incomplete information weakens the importance of early investments in children when...