This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient...

We investigate the impact of observability of contracts between a plaintiff and his attorney on both the efficiency of the environmental conflict and the fairness of the resulting outcome from the environmental conflict. By including two specific game-theoretic models (an observable-contract...

It is possible that a plaintiff uses information about delegation contract as a means of responding strategic interactions between his lawyer and the defendant. We induce this possibility within the class of two-player contests with delegation. In detail, we have the following main results. (i)...

Clientelism is frequently observed in our societies. Various mechanisms that help sustain incomplete political contracts (e.g., monitoring and punishment) have been studied in the literature to date. However, do such contracts emerge in elections with secret ballots when the interactions are...

In this paper, we consider the problem of choosing a set of multi-party contracts, where each coalition of agents has a non-empty finite set of feasible contracts to choose from. We call such problems, contract choice problems. The main result of this paper states that every contract choice...

We consider some of the techno-economic characteristics of smart contracts relating to real-world transactions, and the effectiveness of the governance regimes in which they will operate. We find that the requirement to code the precise executable steps ex ante in smart contracts necessitates a...

We compare procurement contracts where the procurer is either a public agent or a private corporation. Using algorithmic data reading and textual analysis on a rich dataset of con- tracts for a standardized product and service from a single provider, we find that public contracts feature more...

Incumbent politicians may worry about their chances of re-election. Re-election concerns may induce incumbents to write contracts that have low power incentives (LPI) instead of high power incentives (HPI). This may result in inefficient outcomes in cases where high power incentives are...

Public contracts seem to be “expensive” and “inefficient” compared to pure private contracts. Higher prices and inefficiencies in the implementation of public contracts result from their specificity and rigidity, which is how public agents limit hazards from third-party opportunism. We...