Many real world transactions occur in a common agency environment in which an agent interacts with several principals having competing interests. The hold-up literature, however, has so far neglected to investigate common agency transactions. In this paper, we consider the hold-up problem that...

Contrary to previous literature, we show that the assignment of authority decision matters in optimal contract design with bilateral specific self-investments. This is the case when we enlarge the set of the states of nature, to explicitly consider the event that a party's market option turns...

The process of innovation usually differs from one industry to another, according to level of expected rents, the uncertainty over the return of investments and competition dynamics. The diversity of industries is largely reflected not only in their rate of innovation and growth, but also in the...

We empirically investigate the political determinants of liberalization and privatization policies in six network industries of 30 OECD countries (1975–2007). We unbundle liberalization and privatization reforms and study their simultaneous determination in a two-equation model. Unlike...

The key role of institutions for economic performance has recently been acknowledged in the economic policy debate. This paper aims at pointing out the main policy lessons and the recommendations to be drawn from New Institutional Economics (NIE), when considering the organization of markets. We...

The standard model of optimal deterrence predicts that the probability of wrongful conviction of the innocent is, at the margin, as detrimental to deterrence as the probability of wrongful acquittal of guilty individuals. We extend the model in several directions: using expected utility as well...

This paper provides an overview of a recently proposed spectrum sharing model – 'Authorized Shared Access' or 'Licensed Shared Access' (ASA/LSA) – and compares it to other sharing models in order to outline its distinctive features and fields of application. The main feature of this new...

Il presente rapporto analizza l'impatto del DL 15/04/2002 n. 63 del Governo Italiano ("Misure per il contenimento della spesa farmaceutica"), con particolare riferimento agli effetti indotti da tali misure sulle decisioni di investimento delle imprese, sulla struttura dell'industria di...