I evaluate a new German regulation that requires retail discounters to guarantee the availability of their products in bargain sales. The regulation is meant to prevent loss leaders. Retailers undermine the regulation's rationale by claiming that rationing is due to demand uncertainty. This...

"We study how long-term contracts condition on a natural flow of information that reduces asymmetric information over time. If such interim information is verifiable, optimal contracts achieve the first best. Under nonverifiability, the optimal contract depends on the signal's accuracy and...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

We study the potential of cooperation in global emission abatements with multiple externalities. Using a two-country model without side-payments, we identify the strategic effects under different timing regimes of cooperation. We obtain a positive complementarity effect of long-term cooperation...

The framework of incentive compatible finite direct coordination mechanisms in the sense of Myerson (1982) [5] is isomorphic to a framework of incentive compatible stochastic mediated contracts in the sense of Rahman and Obara (2010) [11] and Rahman (2009) [10]. The equivalence follows because...

This paper considers the canonical sequential screening model and shows that when the agent has an ex post outside option, the principal does not benefit from eliciting the agent's information sequentially. Unlike in the standard model without ex post outside options, the optimal contract is...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer — the seller — follows from a non–trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer–induced certification acts as an...

This paper investigates political uncertainty as a source of regulatory risk. It shows that political parties have incentives to reduce regulatory risk actively: Mutually beneficial pre–electoral agreements that reduce regulatory risk always exist. Agreements that fully eliminate it exist when...