We provide an elementary proof showing how in economics with an arbitrary number of agents an arbitrary number of public goods and utility functions quasi-linear in money, any efficient and individually rational mechanism is not strategy-proof for any economy satisfying a mild regularity...

In this paper we consider a model of cooperative production in which rational agents have the possibility to engage in sabotage activities that decrease output. It is shown that sabotage depends on the interplay between the degree of congestion, the technology of sabotage, the number of agents...

We analyze how a contest organizer chooses the winner when the contestants.efforts are already exerted and commitment to the use of a given contest success function is not possible. We define the notion of rationalizability in mixed-strategies to capture such a situation. Our approach allows to...

We examine two approaches to contest success functions. In the first we analyze the implications of contestants´ incomplete information concerning the `type´ of the contest administrator. While in the case of two contestants this approach can rationalize prominent contest success functions, we...

In this paper we analyze the implementation of socially optimal mergers when the regulator is not informed about the parameters that determine social and private gains from potential mergers. We find that most of the standard tools in dominant strategy implementation, like the revelation...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals can benefit from offering long-term contracts...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...