RAND Journal of Economics articles from June 2004

RAND Journal of Economics archives from June 2004

The economics of repeated extortion.(organisational corruption)
June 22, 2004... We provide a simple model of repeated extortion. In particular, we ask whether corrupt government officials' opportunism to demand more once entrepreneurs have made sunk investments entails further distortion in resource allocations. If the...

Abuse of authority and hierarchical communication.(organisational management)
June 22, 2004... If managers and their subordinates have the same basic qualifications, organizations can benefit from replacing unproductive superiors with more productive subordinates. This threat may induce superiors to deliberately recruit unproductive...

Bureaucracy as a mechanism to generate information.(management practices)
June 22, 2004... Firms that maintain no formal record of actions and events would hardly be considered well managed. Yet, organizations that require the recording of actions and the filing of reports are often labelled "bureaucratic" and inefficient. We argue...

Network externalities and technology adoption: lessons from electronic payments.(banking industry)
June 22, 2004... We analyze the extent of network externalities for the automated clearinghouse (ACH) electronic payments system using a panel dataset on bank adoption and usage of ACH. We develop three methods. The first examines the clustering of ACH...

Revenue sharing and control rights in team production: theories and evidence from joint ventures.(analysis)
June 22, 2004... We present a model of team production motivated by the stylized facts we found from a sample of 200 joint- venture contracts. The model incorporates the revenue-sharing contract into the property rights and the transaction cost theories of the...

Moral hazard and nonexclusive contracts.
June 22, 2004... We study equilibria for economies with hidden action in environments in which the agents' contractual relationships with competing financial intermediaries cannot be monitored (or are not contractible upon). We fully characterize equilibrium...

Competition for listings.
June 22, 2004... We develop a model in which stock exchanges compete for IPO listings. They choose the listing fees paid by entrepreneurs wishing to go public and control the trading costs incurred by investors. All entrepreneurs prefer lower trading costs but...

Auditing and property rights.
June 22, 2004... Third-party audit provides incentives to an agent whose actions affect the value of an asset. When audit intensity and outcome are unverifiable, we show that with interim-participation constraints the optimal mechanism may use only the...

The competitiveness of joint bidding in multi-unit uniform-price auctions.
June 22, 2004... Recent literature on joint bidding in a single-unit, common-value (CV) auction argues it enhances competition. Information pooling mitigates adverse selection and thus elevates bidding and may even increase revenue despite the reduction in the...

Hold-up and sequential specific investments.(projects)
June 22, 2004... We explore the hold-up problem when parties can make investments simultaneously or sequentially. Sequencing of investments can allow some projects to proceed that would not be feasible with a simultaneous regime. However, a cost of sequencing...

Health service gatekeepers.
June 22, 2004... Incentive contracts for gatekeepers who control patient access to specialist medical services provide too-weak incentives to investigate cost further when the expected cost of treatment is greater than the benefit. Making gatekeepers residual...

RAND Journal of Economics Turnaround Times.(Illustration)
June 22, 2004... RAND Journal of Economics Turnaround Times First Decision (%) Month 0-3 4-6 7-9 10+ No Decision Total Submitted Months Months Months Months (%) (%) July 2001...