We analyze the effect of price caps on equilibrium production and welfare in oligopoly under demand uncertainty. We find that high price caps always increase production and welfare as compared to the situation without price cap. Price caps close to marginal cost may lead to zero production,...

We study the importance of uncertainty and public finance to the welfare ranking of three environmental policy instruments: pollution taxes, pollution permits and Kyoto-like numerical rules for emissions. The setup is the basic stochastic neoclassical growth model augmented with the assumptions...

We demonstrate the advantages of a climate treaty based solely on rules for international permit markets when there is uncertainty about abatement costs and environmental damages. Such a ‘Rules Treaty’ comprises a scaling factor and a refunding rule. Each signatory can freely choose the...

The paper revisits the impact of uncertainty on the decision problem of a bank. The bank extends risky loans to private investors and sells deposits to savers at fixed rates. The uncertainty under which deposit/loan-portfolios are chosen by banks is endogenized through an information system that...

Contributing to the literature on the consequences of behavioral biases for market outcomes and institutional design, we contrast producer liability and minimum quality standard regulation as alternative means of social control of product-related torts when consumers are heterogeneously...

A deferred annuity typically includes an option-like right for the policyholder. At the end of the deferment period, he may either choose to receive annuity payouts, calculated based on a mortality table agreed to at contract inception, or receive the accumulated capital as a lump sum....

The welfare cost of random consumption fluctuations is known from De Santis (2007) to be increasing in the level of individual consumption risk in the economy. It is also known from Barillas et al. (2009) to increase if agents in the economy care about robustness to model misspecification. In...