Empirical evidence suggests that banks often engage in refinancing of intrinsically insolvent debtors instead of writing off their nonperforming loans. Such forbearance lending may induce soft budget constraints for the debtors, diminishing their incentives to thwart default. This paper...

Even if contract enforcers are as opportunistic as ordinary traders, a system of adjudication can increase the degree to which contractual obligations on large anonymous markets are fulfilled. Only if arbitrators receive a fixed income, occasional mistakes will not favour the untrustworthy. It...

The efficiency hypothesis of institutional change is formulated in a general economic setting. The validity of this hypothesis depends on the specification of the new institution and the political process governing the institutional change. The issue is formulated as an implementation problem...

This paper examines an international mixed model in which a domestic state-owned welfare-maximizing public firm competes against a foreign labor-managed income-per-worker-maximizing private firm. In the first stage, each firm independently decides whether or not to make a commitment to capacity....

It is common to find in experimental data persistent oscillations in the aggregate outcomes and high levels of heterogeneity in individual behavior. Furthermore, it is not unusual to find significant deviations from aggregate Nash equilibrium predictions. In this paper, we employ an evolutionary...

Pérez-Castrillo and Wettstein (2002) and Veszteg (2004) propose the use of a multibidding mechanism for situations where agents have to choose a common project. Examples are decisions involving public goods (or public "bads"). We report experimental results to test the practical tractability...

We study a sequential protocol of endogenous coalition formation based on a process of bilateral agreements among the players. We apply the game to a Cournot environment with linear demand and constant average costs. We show that the final outcome of any Subgame Perfect Equilibrium of the game...

We study optimal contracts in a simple model where employees are averse to inequity as modelled by Fehr and Schmidt (1999). A "selfish" employer can profitably exploit such preferences among its employees by offering contracts which create inequity off-equilibrium and thus, they would leave...

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects' incentives are drastically...

The model we discuss in this note is a re-examination of the classical Bertrand model of imperfect competition. the main difference is that consumers are allowed to have some strategic behavior when deciding from which one of the two sellers to buy. We will approach the resolution of the...