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We consider the development of an incentive mechanism to induce users of a service facility to reveal the parameters the system administrator requires to determine the optimal sequence of service to queued users. We first consider using the taxation procedure recently suggested for public goods,...

A vertically differentiated labor market can be viewed longitudinally as careers or in cross section as hierarchy. The equilibrium structure results from simultaneous choice of careers by individuals and hierarchy by firms. We compare steady states in a model which is simple because there are...

This note, which was stimulated by Ekern and Wilson's study of the theory of the firm in an economy with incomplete markets, gives conditions for ex ante and ex post stockholders to be unanimous in their respective preferences among alternative production plans. This modest extension of Ekern...

Occupational health and safety regulation imposes on enterprises an expected penalty that is positively related to the presence of unsafe working conditions for firms not in compliance with the standards. Higher expected penalties will increase enterprises' investment in work quality inputs,...

The central thesis under consideration is the proposition by Messrs. Harvey Averch and Leland L. Johnson that "if the rate of return allowed by the regulatory agency is greater than the cost of capital but is less than the rate of return that would be enjoyed by the firm were it free to maximize...

This paper develops a formal model of competitive bidding to analyze some aspects of the federal offshore oil leasing system. The lease sales of interest are often characterized by small numbers of auction participants and by high levels of uncertainty regarding the true values of the leases...

In the economic theory of investment behavior the form of the optimal production and investment policy depends critically on the form of technology. The purpose of this paper is to select an appropriate description of technology on the basis of empirical evidence for United States manufacturing...

In markets with qualitative uncertainty, pricing on the basis of average quality will be unattractive to participants whose products are above average in quality. This note examines the possibility of quality certification as an alternative to exit from the market in such situations. Examples...

The free rider problem is restated more precisely as the cheap rider problem. It is argued that if one takes account of the frequent or typical asymmetry in the interests of different enterprises in an industry, the individual incentives of many enterprises to participate in joint ventures are...