We model appeals courts as Bayesian decision makers with private information about a supreme court's interpretation of the law; each court also observes the previous decisions of other appeals courts in similar cases. Such 'persuasive influence' can cause 'herding' behavior by later appeals...

We develop a model wherein a reputation for prosecutorial malfeasance reduces the willingness of witnesses to cooperate with prosecutors. This causes an increase in the crime rate and in wrongly-convicted innocent defendants. Because citizens are taxpayers and may be victims, perpetrators,...

We develop a model of individual prosecutors (and teams of prosecutors) to address the incentives for the suppression of exculpatory evidence. Our model assumes that each individual prosecutor trades off a desire for career advancement (by winning a case) and a disutility for knowingly...

We develop a model of individual prosecutors (and teams of prosecutors) and show how, in equilibrium, team-formation can lead to increased incentives to suppress evidence (relative to those faced by a lone prosecutor). Our model assumes that each individual prosecutor is characterized by a...

In this paper we examine the behavior of a firm that produces a product with a privately-observed safety attribute; that is, consumers cannot observe directly the product's safety. The firm may, at a cost, disclose its safety prior to sale; alternatively, if a firm does not disclose its safety...

Firms communicate product quality attributes to consumers through a variety of channels, such as pricing, advertising, releases of research reports and test results, or warranties and returns policies. The conceptualization of the economics of such communication is that it takes on one of two...