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Browsing by Duke-affiliated Author "Lewis, Tracy R."

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Browsing by Duke-affiliated Author "Lewis, Tracy R."

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  • How Liable Should a Lender Be? The Case of Judgment-Proof Firms and Environmental Risk: Comment
    Lewis, Tracy; Sappington, David E. M. (The American Economic Review, 2001)
    In a previously published article in this Review, Rohan Pitchford (1995) develops an interesting model of lender liability and derives an intriguing finding. He shows that when lenders are held liable for the social damages ...
  • Incentives for Conservation and Quality-Improvement by Public Utilities
    Lewis, Tracy; Sappington, David E. M. (The American Economic Review, 1992)
    We examine the design of incentive programs to motivate regulated utilities to supply both basic service (e.g., electricity supply, local telephone service) and service enhancements (e.g., energy-conservation services, ...
  • Inflexible Rules in Incentive Problems
    Lewis, Tracy; Sappington, David E. M. (The American Economic Review, 1989)
    In practice, contracts involve "standard terms" or "rules," allowing for variations only under "exceptional" circumstances. We develop a simple model in which optimal contracts display this feature, even in the absence of ...
  • Information Management in Incentive Problems
    Lewis, Tracy; Sappington, David E. M. (Journal of Political Economy, 1997)
    We extend the standard procurement model to examine how an agent is optimally induced to acquire valuable planning information before he chooses an unobservable level of cost-reducing effort. Information acquisition concerns ...
  • Managing Dynamic Competition
    Lewis, Tracy; Yildirim, Huseyin (American Economic Review, 2002)
    In many important high-technology markets, including software development, data processing, communications, aeronautics, and defense, suppliers learn through experience how to provide better service at lower cost. This ...
  • Managing Switching Costs in Multiperiod Procurements with Strategic Buyers
    Lewis, Tracy; Yildirim, Huseyin (SSRN eLibrary, 2005)
    This article examines the use of switching costs by long-lived strategic buyers to manage dynamic competition between rival suppliers. The analysis reveals how buyers may employ switching costs to their advantage. We show ...
  • Motivating Wealth-Constrained Actors
    Lewis, Tracy; Sappington, David E. M. (The American Economic Review, 2000)
    We examine how owners of productive resources (e.g., public enterprises or financial capital) optimally allocate their resources among wealth-constrained operators of unknown ability. Optimal allocations exhibit: (1) shared ...
  • Oligopoly and Financial Structure: The Limited Liability Effect
    Brander, James A.; Lewis, Tracy (The American Economic Review, 1986)
    We argue that product markets and financial markets have important linkages. Assuming on oligopoly in which financial and output decisions follow in sequence, we show that limited liability may commit a leveraged firm to ...
  • Optimal Industrial Targeting with Unknown Learning by Doing
    Dinopoulos, Elias; Lewis, Tracy; Sappington, David E. M. (Journal of International Economics, 1995)
    We examine a government's optimal targeting policy when it has limited information about the learning curves of domestic producers. Popular arguments suggest that in order to promote learning-by-doing, the government might ...
  • Preemption, Divestiture, and Forward Contracting in a Market Dominated by a Single Firm
    Lewis, Tracy (The American Economic Review, 1983)
    A central concern of industrial organization literature is to determine if markets dominated by a leading producer tend to remain that way when entry by rival firms is possible. In particular, suppose market entry is ...
  • Protecting the Environment When Costs and Benefits Are Privately Known
    Lewis, Tracy (SSRN eLibrary, 1996)
    In this survey I analyze different approaches for protecting the environment when stakeholders are privately informed about the costs and benefits of pollution reduction. The presence of asymmetric information calls for ...
  • Regulating a Monopolist with Unknown Demand
    Lewis, Tracy; Sappington, David E. M. (The American Economic Review, 1988)
    Optimal regulatory policy is derived in a setting where the firm has better knowledge of demand than the regulator. When marginal production costs increase with output, the regulator can induce the firm to use its private ...
  • Renegotiation and Specific Performance
    Lewis, Tracy; Perry, Martin K.; Sappington, David E. M. (1989)
    This article will examine the implications of enforcing specific performance for attempted breach of contract in a model of renegotiation. It will be shown that after the supplier receives relevant private information, ...
  • Sufficient Conditions for Extracting Least Cost Resource First
    Lewis, Tracy (Econometrica, 1982)
    Kemp and Long demonstrated that it may be preferable to exploit high and low cost resource deposits simultaneously and not in sequence as is typically assumed in the resources literature. They show that it is desirable to ...