We consider the employment relation within firms with reference to investment in human capital. Although the firm knows the future value of the worker's human capital to the worker, the worker only finds this out after the training is complete. Both moral hazard and adverse selection problems...

This paper unifies two significant but somewhat contradictory ideas. First, search costs potentially influence market price equilibria significantly; in many equilibria consumers do not search despite above-competitive prices. Second, cartels must guard against individual members offering lower...

In this paper several firms compete for the right to obtain intellectual property protection for a basic idea which has subsequent potential applications. The modelling employs an auction analogy, taking the context to be an n-player all-pay auction, with a reserve. We find that, even taking...

An increase over time in the proportion of young people obtaining a degree is likely to impact on the relative ability compositions (i) of graduates and non-graduates and (ii) across graduates with different classes of degree award. In a signalling framework, we examine the implications of this...

A large literature has accumulated which examines how the optimal solution of an agent maximising the expectations of a real-valued function depending on a rendom parameter p and the agents's behaviour x reacts to pertubations in the first and second moments of p. In this literature p is given...

This paper considers the situation where two products are sold by the same seller, but to disjoint sets of potential buyers. Externalities may arise from each market outcome to the other. The paper examines the nature of the seller's optimal mechanism, and, for example in the case of positive...

An increase over time in the proportion of young people obtaining a degree is likely to impact on the relative ability compositions (i) of graduates and non-graduates and (ii) across graduates with different classes of degree award. In a signalling framework, we examine the implications of this...