In a tournament, competitors may engage in undesirable activities, or 'cheating', in order to gain an advantage. Examples of such activities include the taking of steroids, plagiarism, and 'creative accounting'. This paper considers the problem of deterrence of these activities and finds that...

This paper provides an efficiency explanation for regulation of sex, drugs and gambling (the so-called ``morality laws''). The argument is motivated by the observation that the design an enforcement of these laws often promotes discretion by the people engaging in such activities. We propose...

The economic theory of optimal punishments states that the expected penalty for a crime ought to be equal (or at least proportional) to the social harm caused by the act. The Criminal Codes in both Canada and the United States allow for criminals to be penalized to a greater degree if they are a...

Modern consumers of intellectual property, and especially software, find that the products they buy are protected by ever more sophisticated forms of copy protection. This occurs despite the presence of legislative protection. The economics literature within the area has begun to take note, yet...

In Nash equilibrium, agents are autarchic in their optimization protocol, whereas in Kantian equilibrium, they optimize in an interdependent way. Typically, researchers into the evolution of homo economicus treat preferences as being determined by selective adaptation, but hold fixed the...

In nash equilibrium, agents are autarchic in their optimization protocol, whereas in Kantian equilibrium,they optimize in an interdependent way. Typically, researchers into the evolution of homo economicus treat preferences as being determined by selective adaptation, but hold fixed the...

This paper examines the incentives that property division laws can have for divorce and investment in marital assets. This paper considers an environment in which spouses have multiple inputs, such as time and money, to a marital asset but the choices a spouse makes with regards to one input,...

We examine the link between the penalties used to punish convicted criminals and judicial prejudice against defendants. In our model, agents choose to commit crimes if their privately observed utility from doing so is high enough. A crime generates noisy evidence, and defendants are convicted...

If willingness to pay depends on characteristics of other attendees, a monopolist will use a lineup as a screening mechanism only if a consumer's characteristic is inversely related to her cost of lining up. No capacity constraint is necessary.