This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient...

This paper studies the role of transfers among groups within a country as well as among countries in a two level game of international trade negotiations. We show that in order to realize the intended transfer in the presence of asymmetric information on the states of recipients (and donors), a...

We analyze an economy with asymmetric information and endogenize the possibilities for information transmission between members of a coalition. We then define a concept of the Core that takes into account these communication possibilities. The internal consistency of the improvements is...

In this paper we extend a model by A. Ulph (1997) on the relationship between free trade agreements, environmental regulation and trade under imperfect competition. Ulph's model focused on the effectiveness of harmonisation policies against ecological dumping. It turned out that harmonised...

In this paper we analyze the frequently observed phenomenon that (i) some members of a team ("black sheep") exhibit behavior disliked by other (honest) team members, who (ii) nevertheless refrain from reporting such misbehavior to the authorities (they set up a "wall of silence"). Much cited...

This paper addresses the question of delegation in a partial contracting set-up, where only the control over actions is contractible. We consider an organization that should take two decisions, affected by a common state of the world parameter only known by the agent. We show that, if the...

Numerous laboratory experiments show that workers reciprocate to high wages with high effort, when there is perfect information on the surplus created. Recent field experiments, however, suggest that trust and reciprocity may be lower or absent when the information is incomplete. We report a...

In this paper we analyze the frequently observed phenomenon that (i) some members of a team (“black sheep”) exhibit behavior disliked by other (honest) team members, who (ii) nevertheless refrain from reporting such misbehavior to the authorities (they set up a “wall of silence”). Much...

We study a general static noisy rational expectations model, where investors have private information about asset payoffs, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of...

This paper analyzes the implications of currency crises in a model with unique equilibrium. Starting from a typical multiple equilibria model with self-fulfilling expectations we introduce noisy information, following Morris/Shin (1999). Under certain conditions for the noise parameter, all...