John Searle has argued against the viability of strong versions of artificial intelligence. His most well-known counter-example is the Chinese Room thought experiment where he stressed that syntax is not semantics. We reason by analogy to highlight previously unnoticed similarities between...

The need for intra-firm incentive schemes allows remodeling the Cournot duopoly in wages (rather than in output levels). In both versions of the Cournot model, a cartel agreement is unstable. The new formulation, however, allows us to demonstrate that a collective wage agreement on minimum wages...

Contrary to previous literature we hypothesize that interests of labor may well - like that of shareholders - aim at securing the long-run survival of the firm. Consequently, employee representatives on the supervisory board could well have an interest in increasing incentive-based compensation...

We investigate the problem of subsidising afforestation when private information exists with respect to the level of private utility derived from the project. We develop a simple model that allows for an intelligent design of contracts when information is asymmetric. The model involves the...

This paper shows that, contrary to what is generally believed, decreasing concavity of the agent's utility function with respect to the screening variable is not sufficient to ensure that stochastic mechanisms are suboptimal. The paper demonstrates, however, that they are suboptimal whenever the...

Contrary to previous literature we hypothesize that labor's interest may well – like that of shareholders – aim at securing the long-run survival of the firm. Consequently, employee representatives on the supervisory board could well have an interest in increasing incentive-based...

A significant and growing share of US agricultural output is produced under a production or marketing contract. An important controversy regarding agricultural production contracts is the control of non-labor inputs. Over time, contracts have tended to place more inputs under the buyer's control...

Public-private partnerships have become an important tool for delivering essential public goods, but critics fear that they erode public accountability. Making partnerships more accountable requires a clear understanding of what accountability means for partnerships and which mechanisms can be...

I show that deterministic dynamic contracts between a principal and an agent are always at least as profitable to the principal as stochastic ones, if the so-called first-order approach in dynamic mechanism design is satisfied. The principal commits, while the agent\'s type evolution follows a...

Summary Transaction costs are an obstacle to the efficient operation of selective contracting. Health care delivery systems (§140 a-d SGB V) and selective contracting between networks of service providers and purchasers are advocated as an effective method to improve the performance of the...