Under the TRIPS agreement, WTO members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals. The debate about the merits of this requirement has been and continues to be extremely contentious. Many poor developing economies claim that patent protection for pharmaceuticals will result in...

This paper proves a simple and general theorem on resource-allocation mechanisms that achieve Pareto efficiency. We say that a mechanism (game form) is normal if at any action profile, an agent who obtains his endowments neither pays nor receives a positive amount. In the context of auctions,...

In this paper we investigate how the advice that lawyers provide to their clients affects the disclosure of evidence and the outcome of adjudication, and how the adjudicator should allocate the burden of proof in light of the effect. Despite lawyers' expertise in assessing the evidence, their...

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old-age Social Security as a public program? In the first part of the paper, we document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and...