We investigate the economic significance of trading off empirical validity of models against other desirable model properties, and the potential loss from ’overestimating’ model uncertainty and basing monetary policy on a relatively robust model, or on a suite of models. We find that...

Implementation of the Kyoto Protocol is likely to leave Russia and other Eastern European countries with market power in the market for emission permits. Ceteris paribus, this will raise the permit price above the competitive permit price. However, Russia is also a large exporter of fossil...

We study a health-insurance market where individuals are o.ered coverage against both medical expenditures and losses in income. Individuals vary in their level of innate ability. If there is private information about the probability of illness and an individual’s innate ability is su.ciently...

Our concern is with a firm-specific industrial policy. When R&D subsidies or taxes are differentiated among firms, the question arises which firms in an industry should receive such support. We analyze a situation where firms differ in their R&D technologies in two distinct ways: They differ...

We consider a model of strategic informative advertising where the advertising is done on TV and where the TV channels' advertising prices are endogenously determined. We discuss how these prices, and the advertising firms' advertising efforts, vary with the two key parameters of the model: the...

We consider how a benevolent regulator should regulate a polluting export industry when the industry, having private information about its abatement efficiency, has an option to move its operations abroad, with a type-dependent outside option rent. The paper focuses on the case where outside...

We justify the application to extensive games of the concept of ‘fully permissible sets’, which corresponds to choice sets when there is common certain belief of the event that each player prefer one strategy to another if and only if the former weakly dominates the latter on the set of all...

A belief operator derived from preferences is presented. It generalizes ‘belief with probability1’ to incomplete preferences and satisfies minimal requirements for belief operators under weak conditions.

When uncertain evidence may lead to legal errors, a reduced standard of proof affects the incentive to violate the law. With noisy evidence, an agent may be convicted even if he obeys the law (type I error) or acquitted even if he violates the law (type II error). If the standard of proof is...

In many developing and transition economies Mafia-like activities are rampant. Extortion and other forms of predation lower profitability in private businesses and distort investment incentives. Incorporated in a model of industrialization, bimodal club convergence may result. Economies may get...