This paper argues that, in the middle ages, voting institutions emerged as mechanisms that allowed rulers to cooperate with subjects on mutually profitable projects. In spite of their utility, many of these voting institutions eventually declined. The authors test the model on the English...

Collaboration among people is often subject to shirking; the net gain from collaboration depends on the contract governing it. The author argues that the entrepreneur assumes the role of residual claimant because his actions are more costly to monitor than those of the factors with which he...

In this paper the author suggests that besides Frank Knight's well recognized "uncertainty" explanation of the firm, he had another one. "Moral hazard" is the central feature in the second, largely overlooked theory. The author argues, and attempts to document, that this theory is not a chance...

Contract stipulations tend to be subject to commodity standards. Standards make it clearer what transactors have agreed upon. They also bring stipulations from different contracts under a common denominator. The lower the cost of measuring an attribute and the wider the range of its application,...

In a market with heterogeneous individuals, the fact that a particular group of individuals are the consumers of a particular product already indicates that there exist systematic differences between them and the average person. Simple tools from statistical theory are used here to analyze the...

The market for resident domestic helpers offers a rare opportunity where the surplus from employment relationship can be quantitatively measured for each individual employee. Using the difference between employer's cost of time and employee's wage as a measure of rent, it is found that wages for...

"This article proposes a theory of group formation based on the motive to seek informed opinion. Because an individual evaluates whether others are informed or not using his own priors, he identifies people with similar beliefs to be more informed than those with different beliefs. The result is...