In public procurement a temporal separation of award and actual contracting can frequently be observed. In this paper we give an explanation for this institutional setting. For incomplete procurement contracts we show that such a separation may increase efficiency. We show that efficiency can be...

In a simplifying analytical framework with endogenous levels of actual and self-reported emissions, we consolidate the existing literature into three main hypotheses about the relative merits, for a resource-constrained regulator, of random (RAM) and competitive (CAM) audit mechanisms in the...

Firms often try to influence individuals that, like regulators, are tasked with advising or deciding on behalf of a third party. In a dynamic regulatory setting, we show that a firm may prefer to capture regulators through the promise of a lucrative future job opportunity (i.e., the...

Corporate actors differ from individuals in one important respect: technically, it may be possible to observe the formation of the corporate will from outside, and to impact on its formation. This feature can be exploited by regulators. One technology is inducing corporate actors to hire an...

When grades lose their informative value because the percentage of students receiving the best grade rises without any corresponding increase in ability, this is called grade inflation. Conventional wisdom says that such grade inflation is unavoidable since it is essentially costless to award...