Gautier Ariette.- Slave families in the French Antilles, 1635-1848 It has long been thought that there were few slave couples in the French Antilles because there were few married slaves. But marriage is a poor indicator of the existence of families since both owners and slaves - men and women -...

In a repeated interaction between a principal and two agents with inter-agents externalities and asymmetric information, we show that optimal decentralization within the organization is limited to the …first period and across agents.

In the postal sector, the net cost of universal service depends on the content of the service, the postal market characteristics and the country s geographical configuration. These three groups of factors affect both the direct cost of providing the service and the extent of competition on the...

In a fully liberalized postal market, two business models will be possible for a new postal operator: (1) access: where the firm performs the upstream operations and uses the incumbent's network for final delivery and (2) bypass where the competing firm controls the entire supply chain and...

We consider the problem of regulating a monopolist with unknown costs when the regulator has limited funds. The optimal regulatory mechanism satisfies four properties. The first property is bunching at the top, that is the more efficient types produce the same quantity irrespective of their...

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...

This note points out the differences between conducting several projects within one big firm (common ownership) and conducting each project within an independent firm (separate ownership).

This paper addresses the question of delegation in a partial contracting set-up, where only the control over actions is contractible. We consider an organization that should take two decisions, affected by a common state of the world parameter only known by the agent. We show that, if the...

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...