We build a game-theoretic model where aggression can be triggered by domestic political concerns as well as the fear of being attacked. In the model, leaders of full and limited democracies risk losing power if they do not stand up to threats from abroad. In addition, the leader of a fully...

Compensation contracts have been criticized for encouraging managers to manipulate information. This includes bonus schemes that encourage earnings smoothing, and option packages that allow managers to cash out early when the firm is overvalued. We show that the intransparency induced by these...

A state which does not desire an arms race may nevertheless acquire new weapons if it believes another state will acquire them. If each state assigns some arbitrarily small probability to the event that the other state has a dominant strategy to acquire more weapons, then a multiplier effect...

A principal must decide whether or not to implement a project that originated with one of her employees. Several employees have information about the quality of the project. A successfully implemented project raises the inventor's chance of promotion, at his peer's expense, but a failed project...

We use a moral hazard model to compare monitored (nontraded) bank loans and traded (nonmonitored) bonds as sources of external funds for industry. We contrast the theoretical conditions that favor each system with the historical conditions prevailing when these financial systems evolved during...

We consider a model where agents work in sequence on a project, share information not available to the principal, and can collude. Due to limited liability the Coase theormem does not apply. The distribution of surplus among the agents is there an important control variable for the principal,...