If a potential tort plaintiff can predict that the court will overestimate damages he is more likely to bring suit, but if the court is aware of this, it will adjust its awards accordingly. In general, court error implies that the court should moderate extreme awards whether they are high or...

It is well known that risk increases the value of options. This paper makes that precise in a new way. The conventional theorem says that the value of an option does not fall if the underlying option becomes riskier in the conventional sense of the mean-preserving spread. This paper uses two new...

I am revising my game theory book, which is due at the publisher's September 1, 1999. This is the preface, which discusses changes I have made.

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...

It is well known that risk increases the value of options. This article makes that precise in a new way. The conventional theorem says that the value of an option does not fall if the underlying asset becomes riskier in the conventional sense of the mean-preserving spread. This article uses two...

A convicted criminal suffers not only from public penalties but from stigma, the reluctance of others to interact with him economically and socially. Conviction can convey useful information about the convicted, which makes stigmatization an important and legitimate function of the criminal...

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...

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...

Randolph Sloof (1997) has written a comment on the lobbying-as-signaling model in Rasmusen (1993) in which he points out an equilibrium the author missed and criticizes the author's emphasis on a particular separating equilibrium. In this response, the author discusses how to interpret multiple...