Informational committees are groups of people who are designated to gather information. This article develops a simple model of committee size based on costly participation and preference heterogeneity. In a setting in which the information structure and policy preferences are both represented...

We introduce discovery into a model of settlement and negative expected value (NEV) suits under asymmetric information. The option to conduct discovery has several important effects. First, because discovery is cheaper than litigation, it reduces the defendant's incentive to settle under...

Prices rise like rockets but fall like feathers. This stylized fact of many markets is confirmed by many empirical studies. In this article, I develop a model with competitive firms and rational partially informed consumers where the asymmetric response to costs by firms emerges naturally. In...

Commercial radio stations and advertisers may have conflicting interests about when commercial breaks should be played. This article estimates an incomplete information timing game to examine stations' equilibrium timing incentives. It shows how identification can be aided by the existence of...

We consider a monopolistic supplier's optimal choice of two-part tariff contracts when downstream firms are asymmetric. We find that the optimal discriminatory contracts amplify differences in downstream firms' competitiveness. Firms that are larger-either because they are more efficient or...

In many situations, irreconcilable disagreements between players lead to costly ownership disputes over assets-for example, in case of joint ownership. This article studies the role of such disputes in a situation where two players have to make a transaction-specific investment and when...

Unsolicited advertising messages vie for scarce attention. Junk mail, spam e-mail, and telemarketing calls need both parties to exert effort to generate transactions. Message receivers supply attention according to average message benefit, while the marginal sender determines congestion....

When several contests compete for the participation of a common set of players, a contest's allocation of prizes not only induces incentive effects but also participation effects. Our model predicts that an increase in the sensitivity with which contest outcomes depend on players' efforts makes...

We argue that when innovation is sequential (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) and complementary (so that each potential innovator takes a different research line), patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static...

This article studies hierarchical organizations where concerns for fast execution are important and employees must be coordinated to avoid wasteful duplications of effort. Simple conditions are provided for the time spent on coordinating subordinates to be increasing and the span of control to...