Principals use threats to make agents accept their demands. But what if agents outnumber threats? When negotiating with agents sequentially, a principal may have to forgo some agents to make threats against others credible. This paper examines a fundamental choice that such a principal faces: to...

This paper studies the role of commitment in the design of enforcement mechanisms when enforcement can remedy harm from non-compliance. We consider a game between an enforcement authority ("enforcer") and an offender in which either the enforcer or the offender may act as a Stackelberg leader....

Injurers often purchase the property of potential victims to avoid liability or to comply with regulations. This paper shows that injurers subject to cost-benefit standards could profit from buying out victims even if they attach no value to the victims' property. Because buyouts allow injurers...

Distributing liability according to injurers' relative fault produces incentives for rent-seeking (excessive care) or free-riding (insufficient care) if precautions are complements or substitutes. We show that composite sharing rules consisting of different weights of proportional and equal...

In the wake of a state-sponsored doping scandal, the World Anti-Doping Agency reommended banning all Russian athletes from the Rio Olympic Games. We study the circumstances in which such group penalties deter a group leader, whose payoff is tied to the group's benefits and sanctions, from...

The ambiguous phrasing of pari passu (equal treatment) clauses in sovereign debt contracts has long baffled commentators. We show that in the presence of asymmetric information on a sovereign borrower's ability to pay, an uncertain clause gives rise to a collective action problem among creditors...

This paper offers an option value-based rationale for the consideration of a non-compliance record in sentencing decisions. We study compliance decisions of a population of individuals who live for two periods. We show that when non-compliance benefits are random and independent across periods,...