Volume 6, Issue 1

A number of European countries, among them the UK and Spain, have opened up their Directory Enquiry Services (DQs) market to competition. In Spain, both local and foreign firms challenged the incumbent as of April 2003. The latter raised its rivals' costs and forced quality downgrading by providing an inferior quality version of the (essential) input, namely the subscribers database. We illustrate how it is possible to quantify the effect of the practice in a situation where an entrant has no previous history in the market. We use the UK experience to construct the relevant counterfactual, that is, the but-for scenario. After controlling for relative prices and advertising intensity, we find that one of the foreign entrants achieved a Spanish market share substantially below what it would have obtained in the absence of abuse. While the case was taken to Court and the nature of the abuse was recognized, the amount of damages awarded was limited to evidence of invoice-based inflated input costs, while estimates derived from construction of the but-for scenario were dismissed. This initial ruling was upheld on appeal. At the time of writing, an appeal had been lodged with the Tribunal Supremo (highest Appeal Court) regarding the quantum of damages. We believe that the limited amount of damages probably reflects a mixture of an overly conservative attitude towards damage awards, coupled with a lack of understanding of the underlying economic reasoning of the case, as well as of the quantitative evidence presented by the aggrieved party.

This paper seeks to explain the negative relationship between female participation in a government and corruption found in empirical research. We propose that even if there are no innate gender differences towards moral values, the costs of corrupt behavior may still differ across genders and are related to the proportion of female participation in government agencies. Hence, females behave more honestly than males do, not because they are naturally prone to it, but because they cannot afford to be corrupt if they are a minority. In that sense, the total density of corruption is non-monotonic in the proportion of female participation.

This article analyzes private law enforcement in an environment with corruption. The effect of corruption is studied both under the assumption of monopolistic enforcement by a single private enforcement agency and under the assumption of competitive enforcement by many private enforcers. In addition, the model takes into account the different objectives of a benevolent, social-welfare-maximizing group and a self-interested, rent-seeking group, as well as the possibility of a government divided between welfare-maximizing and rent-seeking groups. Among the central results of the paper are (1) corruption is especially problematic under monopolistic enforcement, (2) when governmental decision making is divided, a rent-seeking group which is unable to control the level of fines and rewards usually prefers monopolistic to competitive enforcement. The article demonstrates the plausibility and relevance of the model by examining corruption and private law enforcement in pre-modern England.

In the Beckerian crime and deterrence model, maximal fines are optimal. Many models have identified conditions under which this conclusion no longer holds. This note adds to the existing literature by presenting an extension to the standard crime and deterrence model, and shows that if criminals' benefits are state-dependent in a particular way, then maximal fines need not be optimal. It also provides a formal framework for analyzing state-dependent benefits within the context of crime and deterrence.

We analyze the impact of Bad Debt Loss Insurance on settlement outcomes. A success in a settlement or trial can turn into a disaster when the defendant goes bankrupt before paying the plaintiff's claim. The starting point of our paper is a simple trial and litigation model with perfect and complete information. We add the possibility of a defendant’s bankruptcy, and of buying Bad Debt Loss Insurance for both the settlement and the trial stage. We demonstrate that trial insurance and settlement insurance have different impacts on the predicted outcome of settlement negotiations. Trial insurance tends to increase the settlement result; therefore, it generates a contract rent for the insurer and the insured. Settlement insurance, however, has the opposite effect, as it decreases the settlement result.

This paper considers a class of complete information pretrial settlement bargaining games in which externalities can naturally arise due to the existence of multiple litigants. As opposed to earlier literature, it is shown that parties can always settle even though there are bargaining externalities.