Patents are a useful but imperfect reward for innovation. In sectors like pharmaceuticals, where monopoly distortions seem particularly severe, there is growing international political pressure to identify alternatives to patents that could lower prices. Innovation prizes and other non-patent...

Should contract design induce an agent to conduct a precontractual investigation even though, in any case, the agent will become fully informed after the signing of the contract? This paper shows that imperfect investigations might be encouraged. The result stands in contrast to previous...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumerś problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumer's problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumer's problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...

Two individuals are involved in a conflict situation in which preferences are ex ante uncertain. While they eventually learn their own preferences, they have to pay a small cost if they want to learn their opponent's preferences. We show that, for sufficiently small positive costs of information...

The paper provides a tractable, analytical framework to study regulatory risk under optimal incentive regulation. Regulatory risk is captured by uncertainty about the policy variables in the regulator's objective function: weights attached to profits and costs of public funds. Results are as...

The paper provides a tractable, analytical framework to study regulatory risk. Regulatory risk is captured by uncertainty about the policy variables in the regulator's objective function: weights attached to profits and costs of public funds. Results are as follows: 1) The regulator's reaction...

The paper provides a tractable, analytical framework to study regulatory risk. Regulatory risk is captured by uncertainty about the policy variables in the regulator's objective function: weights attached to profits and costs of public funds. Results are as follows: 1) The regulator's reaction...

tThis paper presents an analysis of environmental policy in imperfectly competitive market with publicly disclosed and privately-held information about costs. We examine the potential asymmetry-reducing role of disclosure and its impact on setting environmental taxes. From a policy perspective,...