We consider the learning curve in an industry with free entry and exit and price-taking firms. A unique equilibrium exists if the fixed cost is positive. Although equilibrium profits are zero, mature firms earn rents on their learning, and if costs are convex, no firm can profitably enter after...

Holmstrom (1982) has shown that a non-budget-balancing contract induces a team of risk-neutral agents to choose the first-best effort levels. This is not generally true when agents are risk averse. Furthermore, a "massacre" contract, which punishes all but one agent when the outcome is low, can...

Eric Rasmusen presents a global warming research agenda for economists.

Consider a Bertrand model in which each firm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active firms is uncertain. This simple model has a mixed-strategy equilibrium in which industry profits are positive and decline with the number of firms, the same features which make the...

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...