Antitrust authorities have set up leniency programs for cartel members that denounce their collusive agreements. These programs help prosecute participants and can thereby deter collusion. We compare the impact of reduced fines and positive rewards and argue that rewarding individuals, including...

Two agents sequentially contracts with different principals under moral hazard. If agents care for one another, the second principal gains by insuring them over first wages. Even with independent tasks, the first principal must offer riskier payments to induce effort.

Regulators often do not regulate all firms competing in a given sector. Due to product substitutability, unregulated competitors have incentives to bribe regulated firms to have them overstate their costs and produce less, thereby softening competition. The best collusion-proof contract entails...

Le renouvellement régulier des contrats de concession apparaît nécessaire pour bénéficier de concurrence dans certains secteurs, comme l'eau. Nous décrivons les contrats et la règle de renouvellement optimaux dans ce contexte. Ils arbitrent entre les diminutions de coûts, en cas de...

When an incumbent firm is in charge of a distribution network, it accumulates information on the state of the network. This `common value' information creates a winner's curse during auctions for renewing the concession. The municipality contracting out the provision of the service trades off...

During the last decade, Latin American countries have brought about important reforms in infrastructure services based both on private sector participation for enhancing internal efficiency and competition for increasing consumer welfare. Infrastructure services have evolved from monopoly and...

The impact of regulation of efforts to minimize costs has been widely discussed, but remains difficult to measure. The sophisticated regulation of water utilities in Wisconsin allows us to attempt such on assessment since different firms can be under different regulatory regimes (price cap or...

We empirically investigate the determinants of household flood protective strategies and risk perception using data from a household-level survey conducted in spring 2012 in Vietnam. Our empirical analysis shows that some flood protective behaviours of Vietnamese households are driven by the...