In this article, I develop a simple bidding model in which collusion is endogenous. Buyers at a first-price sealed-bid auction decide whether to rig their bids given that they face the threat of government prosecution. A legal authority chooses whether to investigate the buyers on the basis of...

The 1987 sentencing reforms were expected to change profoundly the environment in which plea bargaining takes place by increasing the average length of sentences for serious crimes and by eliminating the variation in sentences imposed by different judges. Using cases initiated and resolved...

It seems curious that the security of oil supply would again emerge as a source of concern precisely when oil market conditions seem to be most favourable to oil-importing nations. We trace this development to the increased import volumes that have followed the 1986 collapse in the world oil...

Child-support awards constitute an important source of revenue for many single-parent households. The inadequacy of these child-support awards is one of the factors cited to justify the government's recent implementation in January 1997 of a new child-support Guidelines. This paper evaluates...

This paper presents an auction model in which the seller may choose not to sell in spite of receiving a bid above the announced reserve price. Such behavior is seen frequently in auctions, yet would be suboptimal within most existing models. Here, the seller uses resale to signal information...

We study a two-issue bargaining situation in which the surplus of one issue is public information, while that of the other issue is private information to one of the parties. Bargaining is by alternating offers under common time-discounting. The bargaining agenda is determined endogenously since...

In this paper we explore the relations among advertising spending, capacity and quality for services. Data from a sample of New York City restaurants show that mid-quality restaurants spend more on advertising than either high quality or low quality ones, contradicting the usual Nelson-type...