We analyze the impact of liability risks for malpractice on the optimal reimbursement schemes for hospitals. In our model, the hospital decides upon two unobservable efforts, a cost reduction effort and a quality improvement effort. We assume that the total effort is positive even without...

We derive the optimal contract in a model in which the agent's effort is unobservable and his findings are private information. Our focus is on the impact of the agent's wealth constraint. We show that three regions need to be distinguished: if the agent's wealth is above a critical threshold,...

We propose a simple liability rule when several agents are jointly responsible for monitoring a risky economic activity or certifying its security. Examples are safety controls for drugs or technical systems, environmental liability, or air safety accidents. The agents have private knowledge of...

We consider a standard two-player all-pay auction with private values, where the valuation for the object is private information to each bidder. The crucial feature is that one bidder is favored by the allocation rule in the sense that he need not bid as much as the other bidder to win the...

Tighter capital requirements and mandatory deferral of compensation are among the most prominently advocated regulatory measures to reduce excessive risk-taking in the banking industry. We analyze the interplay of the two instruments in an economy with two heterogenous banks that can fund...

We use a laboratory experiment to test the impacts of uncertainty, the magnitude of fines and aversion against making type-I and type-II errors on legal decision making. Measuring uncertainty as the noise of a signal on the defendant's guilt observed by legal decision makers, we observe that a...