This study present a theoretical analysis of contingent fee and hourly wage contracts for legal services. In contrast to previous analyses, it concludes that with risk neutral plaintiffs and attorneys, the contingent fee induces the amount of attorney's effort that would be chosen by a fully...

The labor managed firm (LMF) is viewed as a contract-based coalition of workers. The coalition contract defines the worker's membership in the LMF, gives credence to the short-run risk of layoffs, and identifies the LMF as being more than a mere neoclassical production function plus fixed cost....

The main idea of this article is that geographical concentration of stores selling similar products can be explained by consumers' imperfect information and their resulting need to search the market. A cluster of stores sustained by these forces is not necessarily located at the point that...

This article demonstrates that the partitioning of economic activity into for-profit and nonprofit organizations can be at least partially described as the solution to an optimal contracting problem. We show that nonprofit firms may be superior to for-profit firms if the output cannot be...

This article develops an oligopoly model where both prices and quality levels are determined at the equilibrium. Multiple symmetric equilibria arise when the distribution of consumers according to their willingness to pay is not uniform and more than one firm participates in the market. With a...

This article studies the implications of learning-by-doing for market conduct and performance. We use a general continuous-time model to show that output increases over time in the absence of strategic interactions, and that a monopolist learns too slowly, compared with the social optimum. We...

In an earlier article, Ekelund and Tollison offered a "supply-side" hypothesis for the origins of the corporation. Their emphasis was on the advantages that readily transferable property rights held for the owner-managers of the early corporations. The purpose of this comment is to suggest that...

A duality between cost and production is established for a firm subject to rate-of-return regulation. To this end, a rate-of-return regulated production function is defined and shown to exist. It is then shown how information regarding the unregulated technology can be obtained from the...

This article uses a game-theoretic bidding model to examine the effect of joint bidding in offshore petroleum lease auctions. We show that joint bidding increases the total social value of the lease offering and, in most cases, does not significantly decrease the percentage of social value...

To say that the price of some good is inflexible over time has little meaning if the "good" is changing over time. In this article, I concentrate on delivery lags as the only dimension other than price that varies. It is shown how one can predict the relative importance of price and delivery lag...