Consider legal uncertainty as uncertainty about the legality of a specific action. In particular, suppose that the threshold of legality is uncertain. I show that this legal uncertainty raises welfare. Legal uncertainty changes deterrence in opposite directions. The probability of conviction...

Consider legal uncertainty as uncertainty about the legality of a specific action. In particular, suppose that the threshold of legality is uncertain. I show that this legal uncertainty raises welfare. Legal uncertainty changes deterrence in opposite directions. The probability of conviction...

Willig (1976) argues that the change in consumer's surplus is often a good approximation to the willingness to pay for a price change: if the income elasticity of demand is small, or the price change is small, then the percentage error from using consumer's surplus is small. If the price of a...

This paper argues that because of the irreversibility and uncertainty associated with Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) infrastructure projects, their financial evaluation should also routinely include the determination of the value of the option to defer the construction start-up. This ensures that...

We study the impact of manipulating the attention of a decision-maker who learns sequentially about a number of items before making a choice. Under natural assumptions on the decision-maker's strategy, forcing attention toward one item increases its likelihood of being chosen.

In this paper, we argue that social decisionmaking is subject to a fundamental conflict between consistency and completeness. We show that a consistent welfarist method of policy assessment, that is, one that never violates the Pareto principle, may be incomplete in the sense of being incapable...

Recently Meyer and Ormiston (1999) made an important contribution to resolving the second order condition problem for the case of deductible insurance. Using the level of expected indemnification rather than the level of deductible, Meyer and Ormiston (1999) showed that the second order...

The nature, and normative properties, of competition in health care markets has long been the subject of much debate. In this paper we consider what the optimal benchmark is in the presence of moral hazard effects on consumption due to health insurance. Intuitively, it seems that imperfect...