Randolph Sloof has written a comment on the lobbying-as-signalling model in Rasmusen (1993) in which he points out an equilibrium I missed and criticizes my emphasis on a particular separating equilibrium. In this response, I discuss how to interpret multiple equilibria in games and how to...

Richard Posner suggests several arguments for increasing health care spending on males and reducing it on females in his book, Aging and Old Age . I offer a new formalization of his verbal argument.

This article addresses issues that arise in agency law when agents make contracts on behalf of principals. The main issue is whether the principal should be bound when the agent makes a contract with some third party on his behalf which the principal would immediately wish to disavow. The...

Consider a Bertrand model in which each firm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active firms is uncertain. This activity level can be endogenized in any of several ways-- as whether to incur a fixed cost of activity, as output choice, or as quality choice. Our model has a...

Countries have different comparative advantages in quality. These might be due to technological differences, or to reputation differences of the sort described in Klein & Leffler (1981). Reputation differences are particularly interesting, since good reputations are a form of “social...

Hart & Moore (1999) construct a model to show that contracts perform poorly in complex environments when the state of the world is unverifiable and renegotiation cannot be ruled out. They implicitly assume one player can extort payment from another by threatening to take an inefficient action...

Managerial behavior that is rational and profit-maximizing sometimes will seem to be overly conservative. If the valuation of innovations contains white noise and the status quo would be preferred to random innovation, then any innovation that does not appear substantially better than the status...

If there is queueing for an underpriced good, the queueing can eat up the entire surplus, eliminating the social value of the good. An implication is that there is a discontinuity in social welfare between "enough" and "not enough" for certain goods such as parking spaces. This implies that if...

Various issues in the common law arise when agents make contracts on behalf of principals. Should a principal be bound when his agent makes a contract on his behalf that he would immediately wish to disavow? The tradeoffs resemble those in tort, so the least-cost avoider principle is useful for...