We evaluate the competitive and governance effects of "duality." Duality refers to the joint membership (e.g., by banks) in competing associations or joint ventures (e.g., Visa and MasterCard). We first show that the not-for-profit nature of the associations along with the usage-based fees they...

We build a simple model to capture the major virtues and drawbacks of making public officials accountable (i.e., subjecting them to reelection): On the one hand, accountablity allows the public to screen and discipline their officials; on the other, it may induce those officials to pander to...

The authors scrutinize the conceptual framework commonly used in the incomplete contract literature. This literature usually assumes that contractual incompleteness is due to the transaction costs of describing--or of even foreseeing--the possible states of nature in advance. They argue,...

A central tenet of economics is that individuals respond to incentives. For psychologists and sociologists, in contrast, rewards and punishments are often counterproductive, because they undermine "intrinsic motivation". We reconcile these two views, showing how performance incentives offered by...

The authors first point out that the recent property-rights literature is based on three assumptions: (1) that contracts are always subject to renegotiation; (2) that the exercise of a property right confers a private benefit and (3) that parties are risk-neutral. Building on Hart-Moore (1999),...

This paper uses a simple multitask career concern model in order to analyze the incentives of government agency officials. Incentives are impaired by the agency pursuing multiple missions. A lack of focus is even more problematic in the case of fuzzy missions, that is when outsiders are...