Economists and other auction experts agree that using administrative prices from 25 years ago to set Medicare prices is a bad idea, and that a much better approach is to price Medicare supplies in competitive auctions. That is not surprising. What is surprising is the degree of consensus that...

In recent auctions for paging licenses, the Federal Communications Commission has granted businesses owned by minorities and women substantial bidding credits. In this article, Professors Ayres and Cramton analyze a particular auction and argue that the affirmative action bidding preferences, by...

This Article analyzes how, and when, corporate governance could be improved by utilizing "relational investing." The term relational investing is just coming into vogue and there does not yet seem to be a consensus on what it means. Although the term has been trumpeted on the cover of Business...

When we disclose information, we may also communicate information about information. The listener learns not only X but also that the speaker knows X. And the speaker also learns by speaking (for example, the speaker knows that the listener knows X). In this paper we present a series of examples...

In their reply to our comment on their initial paper, Moody and Marvell continue their analysis of right-to-carry (RTC) laws using panel data for the period 1977-2000. But with six additional years of data now available for analysis, we think the need for further parsing of older data is of...

Moody and Marvell’s recent article in this journal examines a regressionbased calculation in Ayres and Donohue (2003a) that indicated, based on statespecific estimates that were generated using county data from 1977-1997, that right-to-carry concealed handguns (RTC) laws were associated...

We study option management by committee. Analysis is illustrated by tenure decisions. Our innovations are two-fold: we treat the committee's problem as one of social choice, not information aggregation; and we endogenise the outside option: rejecting a candidate at either the probationary or...

Whenever a rule is contractible, the law must establish separate rules governing how private parties can contract around the default legal treatment. To date, contract theorists have not developed satisfying theories for how optimally to set “altering rules,” the rules that set out the...

This article is an edited transcript of a lecture on the Employment Contract presented to a conference of state law judges. Part I introduces a model of a well-functioning labor market, which provides all employee benefits, and only those employee benefits, that employees value more than it...