The rents agents can extract from principals increase with the magnitude of incentive problems, which the literature usually takes as given. We endogenize it, by allowing agents to choose technologies that are more or less opaque and correspondingly prone to agency problems. In our overlapping...

Time-inconsistency of no-bailout policies can create incentives for banks to take excessive risks and generate endogenous crises when the government cannot commit. However, at the outbreak of financial problems, usually the government is uncertain about their nature, and hence it may delay...

We model religious faith as a "demand for beliefs," following the logic of the Pascalian wager. We then demonstrate how an experimental intervention can exploit standard elicitation techniques to measure religious belief by varying prizes associated with making choices contrary to one's belief...

In his elegant book Douglas Allen claims that an improvement in the measurement of Nature made for lower transaction costs and the Industrial Revolution. His argument is a typical example of neo-institutionalism in the style of Douglass North (<CitationRef CitationID="CR14">1990</CitationRef>) and North et al. (<CitationRef CitationID="CR16">2009</CitationRef>). A fall in a wedge of...</citationref></citationref>

This paper provides an analysis of two damage rules (Lost Pro…fit versus Unjust Enrichment) introduced in the French Code de la Propriété Intellectuelle in 2007 (Loi du 27 Octobre 2007, Art. L. 615-7). We use a simple sequential game where both the decisions to infringe and to enforce the...

The relationship between willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce the probability of an adverse event and the degree of risk aversion is ambiguous. The ambiguity arises because paying for protection worsens the outcome in the event the adverse event occurs, which influences the expected marginal...