We develop a financial-contracting theory of the cooperative firm where production requires three generic tasks: working, managing, and monitoring. Workers provide an intermediate input (or labor directly); managers convert the workers' input into a final output; and directors monitor managers....

Cooperative owners have a transactional relationship - as customers or input suppliers - with their firm in addition to their investment relationship. This changes both the incentives and the information that owners have to monitor managerial performance. We argue that this difference reduces...

Participants in U.S. markets for live cattle increasingly rely on federal grading standards to price slaughtered animals. This change is due to the growing prominence of "grid" pricing mechanisms that specify explicit premiums and discounts contingent on an animal's graded quality class....

Participants in U.S. markets for live cattle increasingly rely on federal grading standards to price slaughtered animals. This change is due to the growing prominence of "grid" pricing mechanisms that specify explicit premiums and discounts contingent on an animal's graded quality class....

We examine the strategic non-revelation of information by patent applicants. In a model of a bilateral search of information, we show that patent applicants may conceal information, and that examiners make their screening intensity contingent upon the received information. We then analyze the...

We develop a stylized dynamic model of highway policing in which a non-racist policeman is given incentives to arrest criminals, but faces a per stop cost of stop which increases when the racial mix of the persons he stops differs from the racial mix of the population. We define the fair jail...