Independent central bankers and judges can both be more usefully viewed as trustees than as agents. A trust is a legal institution with rules set up by a settlor, administered by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries. Public trustees often are motivated more by Pride, Policy, Place, and Power...

'Buyer-option' contracts, in which the buyer selects the product variant to be traded and chooses whether to accept delivery, are often used to solve holdup problems. We present a simple game that focuses sharply on subgames in which the buyer proposes inefficient actions in order to improve his...

Bargaining models ask how a surplus is split between two parties in bilateral monopoly. Much of real-world negotiation involves complications to the original split which may or may not increase the welfare of both parties. The parties must decide which complications to propose, how closely to...

Under certain circumstance, a relaxation in occupational licensing standards can increase the quality of those who enter the industry. The effect turns on the opportunity costs of preparing for the licensing examination: making the test easier can increase the quality of those passing if it...

Certifiers of quality often report only coarse grades to the public despite having measured quality more finely, e.g., "Pass" or "Certified" instead of "73 out of 100." Why? We show that coarse grades result in more information being provided to the public because the coarseness encourages those...

The Klein-Leffler model explains how the benefit of future reputation can induce firms to produce high quality experience goods, either in a monopoly or an industry with competing firms. We show that reputation can be leveraged across products, but only by a firm with a monopoly on at least one...

We show that if and only if a real-valued function f is strictly quasiconcave except possibly for a at interval at its maximum, and furthermore belongs to an explicitly determined regularity class, does there exist a strictly monotonically increasing function g such that g o f is strictly...

Bidders have to decide whether and when to incur the cost of estimating their own values in auctions. This can explain why people seem to get carried away, bidding higher than they had planned before the auction and then finding they had paid more than the object was worth to them. Even when...

We look at a Bertrand model in which each firm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active firms is uncertain. The model has a mixed-strategy equilibrium, in which industry profits are positive and decline with the number of firms, the same features which make the Cournot...