McAfee and Reny (1992) have given a necessary and sufficient condition for full surplus extraction in models with a continuum of types. We interpret their condition as significantly stronger version of the requirement of injectiveness of the function mapping abstract types into beliefs and prove...

In a large economy, a first-best provison rule for a public good is robustly implementable with budget balance because no one individual alone can affect the aggregate outcome. First-best outcomes can, however, be blocked by coalitions of agents acting in concert. With a requirement of immunity...

Der Aufsatz diskutiert die Rolle der Wirtschaftswissenschaft in der politischen oder juristischen Diskussion über den Umgang mit ökonomischen Sachverhalten und Zusammenhängen. Die Künstlichkeit der in theoretischen Modellen oder Laborexperimenten untersuchten Welten wirft die Frage nach dem...

Shareholder-creditor conflicts can create leverage ratchet effects, resulting in inefficient capital structures. Once debt is in place, shareholders may inefficiently increase leverage but avoid reducing it no matter how beneficial leverage reduction might be to total firm value. We present...

The paper develops a technique for studying incentive problems with unidimensional hidden characteristics. The technique supports a unified approach, which can be applied regardless of whether the type set is finite, the type distribution has a continuous density, or the type distribution has...

The paper discusses the respective roles of competition policy and sector-specific regulation for industries such as telecommunications, electricity, and gas, in which network infrastructures that are natural monopolies serve as essential facilities for anybody who wants to provide services in...

This report argues in favour of an economics-based approach to Article 82, in a way similar to the reform of Article 81 and merger control. In particular, we support an effects-based rather than a form-based approach to competition policy. Such an approach focuses on the presence of...

The paper reviews and assesses our understanding of the notion of 'market discipline' in corporate governance. It questions the wholesale appeal to this notion in policy discussion, which fails to provide an account of the underlying mechanisms in terms of theory and empirical analysis....

Neeman (2004) and Heifetz and Neeman (2006) have shown that, in auctions with incomplete information about payoffs, full surplus extraction is only possible if agents' beliefs about other agents are fully informative about their own payoff parameters. They argue that the set of...

We examine the pervasive view that 'equity is expensive' which leads to claims that high capital requirements are costly for society and would affect credit markets adversely. We find that arguments made to support this view are fallacious, irrelevant to the policy debate by confusing private...