Environmental self-auditing by private firms is generally thought to both deserveand require encouragement. Firms can audit themselves more cheaply andeffectively than can regulators, but too often are deterred for fear that theinformation they uncover will be used against them. To reduce this...

This paper is a theoretical analysis of incentive setting via civil litigation, with a focus on incentives for care in activities that may be harmful to others (torts). It makes two main contributions: one directly policy-relevant, one conceptual. In most existing research, litigation is modeled...

A companion paper, Sanchirico (1997) introduces the concept of "endogenous cost evidence" in a model of single-agent, mandatory hearings. The current paper extends Sanchirico (1997) by adding multiple parties and allowing for the possibility that agents may choose both whether to attend the...

Environmental self-auditing by private firms is generally thought to both deserve and require encouragement. Firms can audit themselves more cheaply and effectively than can regulators, but too often are deterred for fear that the information they uncover will be used against them. To reduce...

This document is the web appendix for the paper, Tax Eclecticism. (Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1491130.) For easy reference, the document is organized into the same subdivisions (parts, sections, subsections, etc...) as is Tax Eclecticism. Please note that this document is merely...

The dominant view in tax law and policy is that achieving the optimal balance of revenue, efficiency, and equity generally requires basing taxes and transfers solely on income from labor and not also on other potentially taxable attributes such as income from capital. The optimality of...

Two agents with different priors watch a sequence unfold over time, updating their priors about the future course of the sequence with each new observation. Blackwell and Dubins (1962) show that the agentsi opinions about the future will converge if their priors over the sequence space are...

Environmental self-auditing by private firms is generally thought to both deserve and require encouragement. Firms can audit themselves more cheaply and effectively than can regulators, but too often are deterred for fear that the information they uncover will be used against them. To reduce...

Suppose we randomly pull two agents from a population and ask them to observe an unfolding, infinite sequence of zeros and ones. If each agent starts with a prior belief about the true sequence and updates this belief on revelation of successive observations, what is the chance that the two...