Helping somebody may undermine his incentives to work. What Buchanan identified more than 25 years ago as the Samaritan's dilemma is basically a time-inconsistency problem. The paper discusses possible solutions of the dilemma such as punishment within an iterated game, reshaping the game in the...

Drawing on Transaction Costs Economics, this paper develops a new approach to conflict of law rules. It outlines a concept of constitutional uncertainty in international trade and presents a model of international transactions in the presence of a diversity of legal orders. We develop a general...

Mutually beneficial agreements might fail if the parties fear contractual opportunism. Litigation is supposed to be a remedy, but gives scope for another kind of opportunistic behavior which we call litigational opportunism: Even knowing that the opponent has fulfilled his obligations, a party...

Helping somebody may undermine his incentives to work. What Buchanan identified more than 25 years ago as the Samaritan's dilemma is basically a time-inconsistency problem. The paper discusses possible solutions of the dilemma such as punishment within an iterated game, reshaping the game in the...

Mit Hilfe eines einfachen Vertrauensspiels wird die Bedeutung des Vertrauens als Verhaltensphänomen in der Ökonomie dargelegt und ein Vertrauenskonzept entwickelt, das dem Umstand eingeschränkt rationalen Verhaltens Rechnung trägt. Es wird gezeigt, daß trotz der Einbettung einer Transaktion...

This paper discusses institutional reforms that might strengthen the role of the European Parliament in the policymaking process of the European Union. Using simple game theory, the paper analyzes the working properties of the different implementation procedures that are known as 'comitology'....

In this paper we analyze whether trust can overcome the contractual hazards caused by the territoriality of law, how effective trust is and what the impact is on the sequential structure of trade. The paper contributes to the New Institutional Economics of International Transactions (NIEIT).