We consider a cost-reimbursement or a cost-sharing procurement contract between the administration and a firm. The firm privately learns the true cost overrun once the project has started and it can manipulate this information. We characterize the optimal auditing policy of cost overrun claims...

We provide evidence of the widespread use and variety of low-price guarantees (how common are they; on what products and services are they observed; and what forms do they take), using data obtained from newspaper advertisements in thirty-seven metropolitan areas in the United States. We also...

Economic regulation of firms with market power has placed increasing emphasis on incentive-based regulation such as price caps. We focus on the effect of regulation as distinct from ownership, and identify the effect of two different regulatory schemes on both publicly and privately owned...

A two period R&D symmetric Cournot duopoly game with linear demand and costs is analysed under linear (or more general) returns to scale in process R&D. Subgame-perfect equilibrium may call for one firm to fully innovate while the other firm remains just as before. The outcome is a polar duopoly...

We relate the sources of innovation market failure to the dominant mode of sectoral innovation and outline mechanisms for public support of innovation that target specific sources of innovation market failure.

This paper considers the effect of monopoly-promoting export cartels on domestic production. It is argued that export cartels facilitate tacit collusion by monitoring defections more efficiently. This slackesn the incentive constraint of tacit collusion. Optimizing firms competing both in the...

We analyse the value of information that can be used to improve the audit selection to better target the tax gap. We consider a tax authority allocating resources in an attempt to identify the taxpayers who are underreporting with more probability and to increase voluntary compliance. In a...

Kreps and Scheinkman´s (1983) celebrated result is that in a two-stage model of a market with homogeneous products in which firms noncooperatively pick capacities in the first stage and set prices in the second stage, the equilibrium outcome is that of a one-shot Cournot game. This note derives...

Motivated by empirical findings from jewellery sold at public English auctions at Crédit Municipal de Paris, we study the effect of the presence of two types of bidders on equilibrium strategies and on the price tendency. We consider a second-price auction (sealed-bid og English auction) where...

General equilibrium models of oligopolistic competition give rise to relative prices only without determining the price level. It is well known that the choice of a numéraire or, more generally, of a normalization rule converting relative prices into absolute prices entails drastic consequences...