This document, first created in 2007 and last updated in 2010, has now been superseded by the technical discussion in my 2010 article, Privatization, Free Riding, and Industry-Expanding Lobbying, in the International Review of Law and Economics and the plain-English discussion in my 2008...

This paper tests the hypothesis that a (partial) reason why cartels - collective but costly and non-binding price agreements - lead to higher prices in a Bertrand oligopoly could be because of a selection effect: decision-makers who are willing to form price agreements are more likely to be less...

Providing public goods is hard, because providers are best off free-riding. Is it even harder if one group's public good is a public bad for another group or, conversely, gives the latter a windfall profit? We experimentally study public goods provision embedded in a social context and find that...

Critics of privatization argue that privatization encourages providers to lobby for industry expansion. I argue that this is not generally true when public-sector actors also lobby. Where the effectiveness of advocacy depends on total expenditures, some initial amount of privatization always...

This article shows how to design and organize the delivery of public services to promote the kinds of co-productive behavior needed to make public efforts effective. Second, it specifies human-resource management practices that foster an inclination on the part of public employees to encourage...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities), using a Hotelling framework, in the presence of sluggish demand. We take a differential-game approach, and derive the open-loop solution (providers choose the optimal...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities), using a Hotelling framework, in the presence of sluggish demand. We take a differential-game approach, and derive the open-loop solution (providers choose the optimal...

Media content is an important privately supplied public good. While it has been shown that contributions to a public good crowd out other contributions in many cases, the issue has not been thoroughly studied for media markets yet. We show that in a standard model of commercial media bias,...