This paper reviews the use of cost shifting devices intended to encourage pre-trial settlement. Both the well-known instrument of judicial offers (tenders) and the more recently introduced pursuers' offers are discussed. Numerical examples are provided and experimental evidence is reviewed. Both...

The buyer of a homogeneous input employs split-award contracting to divide his input requirements into two contracts that are awarded to different suppliers. The buyer uses a sequential second-price auction to award a larger primary contract and a smaller secondary contract. With a fixed number...

A nonlinear model of inflation and growth, with a fixed rate of money growth, is developed and its global dynamics analysed. These are compared with the local, linearised dynamics of the model. It is shown that the global dynamics of the model plausibly predict hyperinflationary bubbles, which...

This paper documents asymmetries in the aggregate investment activity of UK industrial and commercial companies. It then investigates the ability of a model of aggregate activity based on heterogeneous actions under asymmetric and non-convex adjustment at the individual level to account for this...

Participatory Democracy is a process of collective decision making that combines elements from both Direct and Representative Democracy: Citizens have the ultimate power to decide on policy and politicians assume the role of policy implementation. The aim of this paper is to understand how...

We show by example that communication can cause common knowledge acquisition to fail. In the absence of communication, agents acquire approximate common knowledge of some parameter, but with communication they do not.

In this paper we follow recent developments of panel data studies and explicitly allow for the existence of unobserved common time-specific factors where their individual responses are also allowed to be heterogeneous across cross section units. In the context of this extended panel data...

When there is spatial arbitrage between food markets, the price differential between the markets should equal the cost of transfer. This simple arbitrage rule has formed the basis of many empirical tests of the performance of developing countries’ food markets. Here, a more complex structure...

We view a contract as a list of outcomes. Ex ante, the parties commit not to consider outcomes not on the list, i.e., these are “ruled out”. Ex post, they freely bargain over outcomes on the list, i.e., the contract specifies no mechanism to structure their choice; in this sense outcomes on...

This paper challenges the view that legal rights are not important in affecting whether people divorce, but it puts as much emphasis on property rights (given, for example, by the law on alimony) as on dissolution rights. The paper sets out two stylised models of marriage and examines the...