It is argued that drug consumption, most commonly alcohol drinking, can be a technology to give up some control over one's actions and words. It can be employed by trustworthy players to reveal their type. Similarly alcohol can function as a social lubricant and faciliate type revelation in...

We analyze the costs and benefits of using social image to foster virtuous behavior. A Principal seeks to motivate reputation-conscious agents to supply a public good. Each agent chooses how much to contribute based on his own mix of public-spiritedness, private signal about the value of the...

This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences (values), material or other explicit incentives (laws) and social sanctions or rewards (norms). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals' behaviors and...

Carbon leakage is one of the major issues facing policymakers today when designing environmental regulation. While the empirical and trade literature on carbon leakage is rich, much less is known about the implications of carbon leakage risk on optimal regulatory policies under asymmetric...

This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents' production technologies display learning effects and agents' rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show that...

This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents' production technologies display learning effects and agents' rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show that...

In this paper we consider the problem of financing infrastructure when the regulator faces a budget constraint. The optimal budget-constrained mechanism satisfies four properties. The first property is bunching at the top, that is the more efficient firms produce the same quantity. The second...

This article studies the problem of regulating a monopolist with unknown marginal cost. The originality of the paper is to consider that the regulator faces a cash-in-advance constraint. The introduction of such a constraint not only reduces the amount of public good provided but also limits the...

In this paper we consider the problem of regulating an open access essential facility. A vertically integrated firm owns an essential input and operates on the downstream market under the roof of a regulatory mechanism. There is a potential entrant in the downstream market. Both competitors use...

The paper starts with a description of major reforms of EU policy in the network industries. Based on the normative economics of regulation, it then points out generic information and transaction cost problems of regulatory policy making. An appropriate allocation of regulatory competencies may...