Friedman (1962) argued that a free market in which schools compete based upon their reputation would lead to an efficient supply of educational services. This paper explores this issue by building a tractable model in which rational individuals go to school and accumulate skill valued in a...

As Posner (1997) has observed, when individuals in a relationship can commit to imposing costs upon each other then efficient behavior in the absence of law is possible. The question is whether efficient norms of behavior evolve endogenously in a population. We show that in a standard hold up...

This paper explores the nature of employment contracts in a dynamic model when workers vary by unobserved ability, and there is moral hazard on both sides of the contract. We find that even though a worker's ability is chosen from a continuum, the equilibrium contract is characterized by a...