Although the holdout problem is an established part of legal and economic lore, the exact source of the problem is not well understood. It is usually attributed to high transaction costs or bargaining power on the part of sellers. To isolate the essential features of the problem, we consider the...

Tax motivated takings are takings by a local government aimed purely at increasing its tax base. Such an action was justified by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. New London, which allowed the use of eminent domain for a private redevelopment project on the grounds that the project...

Recently, attention has turned to the use of voluntary agreements between regulators and polluters as an alternative to mandatory approaches based on regulation or legislation. Voluntary agreements have the potential to reduce compliance costs by allowing greater flexibility and to reduce...

One of the great successes of the law and economics movement has been the use of economic models to explain the structure and function of broad areas of law. The original contributions to this volume epitomize that tradition, offering state-of-the-art research on the many facets of economic...

The holdup and holdout problems arise in different contexts, but they share certain fundamental similarities that have not generally been recognized. This paper characterizes the commonalties between the two problems and their remedies.