Both bribery and extortion weaken the power of incentives, but there is a trade-off in fighting the two because rewards to prevent supervisors from accepting bribes create incentives for extortion. Which is the worse evil? A fear of inducing extortion may make it optimal to tolerate bribery, but...

We present a model of vertical contracts between manufacturers and retailers with nonlinear pricing strategies. Using home-scan data on bottled water produced by manufacturers and sold by retail chains in France, we estimate a structural demand and supply model allowing for two-part tariff...

Although there exists a pure separating equilibrium of the two-bidder first-price auction with resale when the bids are kept secret, the ratchet effect prevents the existence of such an equilibrium if the bidders are heterogeneous and the bids are fully disclosed. Nevertheless, we construct a...

A buyer seeks to procure a good characterized by its price and its quality from suppliers who have private information about their cost structure (fixed cost and marginal cost of providing quality). We characterize the buyer's optimal buying mechanism. We then use the optimal mechanism as a...

In the context of an infinitely repeated capacity-constrained price game, we endogenize the composition of a cartel when firms are heterogeneous in their capacities. When firms are sufficiently patient, there exists a stable cartel involving the largest firms. A firm with sufficiently small...

Despite the popularity of pay-for-performance (P4P) among health policy makers and private insurers as a tool for improving quality of care, there is little empirical basis for its effectiveness. We use data from published performance reports of physician medical groups contracting with a large...

Rational players, unconstrained by contracts or formal authority, choose to follow a better-informed leader, whose action reveals part of her information. If the leader satisfies a credibility condition, then the unique nondegenerate equilibrium solves distinct shirking and coordination problems...

What happens when type is endogenous in a reputational setting? Here, customers cannot tell experts from imitative quacks, but gain information through repeated interaction. Firm incentives to invest in expertise vary nonmonotonically in how tolerant customers are of bad outcomes; more tolerant...

This article examines the costs and benefits of permitting executives to use inside information to time their stock option exercises. Whereas prior research has focused on the negative effects of timing discretion, I show that such discretion can have beneficial incentive effects in that it...

We investigate the effects of vertical integration on operational performance. Large U.S. airlines use regional partners to operate some of their flights. Regionals may be owned or governed through contracts. We estimate whether an airline's use of an owned, rather than independent, regional at...