The authors analyze the efficiency and market equilibrium of endogenous categorization, where insurance companies classify risks on the basis of insureds' voluntary consumption of products that are correlated with underlying loss propensities, and they show that the use of such categorization...

A two-stage game is used to model firms' strategic incentives to divide production among autonomous competing units through divisionalization, franchising, or divestiture. Firms simultaneously choose their number of competing units, which then engage in Cournot competition. While it is costly to...

Background risk can influence the performance of insurance markets that must deal with adverse selection when applicants are risk vulnerable, since they are more averse to bearing the insurable risk as a result of their exposures to background risk. We show that background risk always results in...

In many markets governments set minimum quality standards while some sellers choose to compete on the basis of quality by exceeding them. Such ‘high-quality’ strategies often win public acclaim, especially when ‘environmental friendliness’ is the dimension along which firms are...

Voluntary agreements (VAs) negotiated between environmental regulators and industry are increasingly popular. However, little is known about whether they are likely to be effective in developing and transition countries where local and federal environmental regulatory capacity is typically weak....

Regulators sometimes review a regulated firm's input decisions in retrospect (i.e., with "20-20 hindsight") and punish bad outcomes rather than bad decisions. When such practices are applied consistently to contracts for variable factors in a regime with profit regulation, the firm increases its...