Structured Investment Vehicles or SIVs are highly complex derivative-related vehicles and products, typically involving offshore “bankruptcy-remote” special purpose companies and trusts, complex rules for the management of portfolios of derivative assets and additional rules for the...

We investigate the complementarity between informal communities and formal government enforcement of norms of reciprocation and exchange. We introduce a model in which people exchange informally within their community as well as externally on a market. We show that informal community and formal...

Vertical restraints, such as vertical integration, exclusive dealing contracts, and tying and bundling practices, have been subject of lively policy and academic discussions. Scholars associated with the Chicago School challenged early foreclosure doctrines by arguing that vertical restraints...

Why do lawyers in some jurisdictions continue to ‘automatically’ exclude the 1980 UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) in their choices of law for international sales contracts? Why do lawyers in other jurisdictions approach the decision very differently? Why...

In tort litigation, delayed settlement or impasse imposes high costs on the parties and society. Litigation institutions might influence social welfare by affecting the likelihood of out-of-court settlement and the potential injurers' investment in product safety. An appropriate design of...

We study experimentally a two-stage compensation mechanism for promoting cooperation in prisoner's dilemma games. In stage 1, players simultaneously choose binding non-negative amounts to pay their counterparts for cooperating in a given prisoner's dilemma game, and then play the prisoner's...

In Germany, employers can claim the right to any invention made by their employees, but have to pay a compensation if they do so. Recently this compensation was made subject to a legal reform proposal (and a new law concerning university employees). We set up a simple Principal-Agent model to...

In Germany, employers can claim the right to any invention made by their employees, but have to pay a compensation if they do so. Recently this compensation was made subject to a legal reform proposal (and a new law concerning university employees). We set up a simple Principal-Agent model to...

There exists extensive evidence that people learn positively about themselves. We build on this finding to develop a model of team formation in the workplace. We show that learning positively about oneself systematically undermines the formation of teams. Agents becoming overconfident tend to...