This book investigates the ways in which social norms and bounded rationality shape different contracts in the real world. It brings into focus existing research into optimal contracts, draws important lessons from that research, and outlines prospects for future investigation. Bounded rationality has acknowledged effects on the power of incentive provisions, such as deviations from sufficient statistic theorem, the power of optimal incentives, and the effects of optimal contracts in multicultural environments. The introduction of social norms to bounded rationality opens up new avenues of investigation into contracts and mechanism design. This book makes an important contribution to the study of bounded rationality by pulling together many separate strands of research in the area of mechanism design, and providing detailed analysis of the impact of societal values on contracts.

In many industries the tariffs are not strictly proportional to the quantity purchased, i. e, they are nonlinear. Examples of nonlinear tariffs include railroad and electricity schedules and rental rates for durable goods and space. The major justification for the nonlinear pricing is the existence of private information on the side of consumers. In the early papers on the subject, private information was captured either by assuming a finite number of types (e. g. Adams and Yellen, 1976) or by a unidimensional continuum of types (Mussa and Rosen, 1978). Economics of the unidimen sional problems is by now well understood. The unidimensional models, however, do not cover all the situations of practical interest. Indeed, often the nonlinear tariffs specify the payment as a function of a variety of characteristics. For example, railroad tariffs spec ify charges based on weight, volume, and distance of each shipment. Dif ferent customers may value each of these characteristics differently, hence the customer's type will not in general be captured by a unidimensional characteristic and a problem of multidimensional screening arises. In such models the consumer's private information (her type) is captured by an m-dimensional vector, while the good produced by the monopolist has n quality dimensions."

Microeconomics studies the choices made by individuals under conditions of scarcity of resources and time and the interaction between different decision makers. Scarcity forces economic actors to choose one opportunity among many. Microeconomics with Spreadsheets starts with the mathematical preliminaries and covers consumer theory, producer theory, general equilibrium, game theory, market structure and economics of information.The reader will use numerical tools to analyse problems that cannot be analysed analytically. There is a natural synergy between rigorous proofs and numerical methods, since before using a numerical method one should also prove that a solution exists and analyse whether it is unique, and therefore be able to interpret properly the output of a program.

This book provides researchers and students with an understanding of the basic legal tenets of the Islamic finance industry, studying the real economic effects of those tenets using the tools of the modern economic theory. Split into four parts, the book begins with an introduction to the history and a legal framework for Islamic banking, covering typical Islamic financial products such as Sukuk and Takaful and examining the structure of Islamic financial institutions. It then analyzes and discusses the Miller-Modigliani Theorem, which is of direct relevance to Islamic banks which are prohibited to charge interest and often have to rely of profit-loss sharing agreements. Part III of the book introduces the reader to modern mechanism design theory, paying particular attention to optimal contracting under hidden action and hidden information, and final part of the book applies the tools of economic theory to understand performance of Islamic financial institutions such as Islamic banks and Takaful operators. Islamic Finance in Light of Modern Economic Theory brings together all the necessary technical tools for analyzing the economic effects of Islamic frameworks and can be used as an advanced textbook for graduate students who wish to specialize in the area, as a reference for researchers and as a tool to help economists improve the design of Islamic financial institutions.

This book investigates the ways in which social norms and bounded rationality shape different contracts in the real world. It brings into focus existing research into optimal contracts, draws important lessons from that research, and outlines prospects for future investigation. Bounded rationality has acknowledged effects on the power of incentive provisions, such as deviations from sufficient statistic theorem, the power of optimal incentives, and the effects of optimal contracts in multicultural environments. The introduction of social norms to bounded rationality opens up new avenues of investigation into contracts and mechanism design. This book makes an important contribution to the study of bounded rationality by pulling together many separate strands of research in the area of mechanism design, and providing detailed analysis of the impact of societal values on contracts.

In many industries the tariffs are not strictly proportional to the quantity purchased, i. e, they are nonlinear. Examples of nonlinear tariffs include railroad and electricity schedules and rental rates for durable goods and space. The major justification for the nonlinear pricing is the existence of private information on the side of consumers. In the early papers on the subject, private information was captured either by assuming a finite number of types (e. g. Adams and Yellen, 1976) or by a unidimensional continuum of types (Mussa and Rosen, 1978). Economics of the unidimen sional problems is by now well understood. The unidimensional models, however, do not cover all the situations of practical interest. Indeed, often the nonlinear tariffs specify the payment as a function of a variety of characteristics. For example, railroad tariffs spec ify charges based on weight, volume, and distance of each shipment. Dif ferent customers may value each of these characteristics differently, hence the customer's type will not in general be captured by a unidimensional characteristic and a problem of multidimensional screening arises. In such models the consumer's private information (her type) is captured by an m-dimensional vector, while the good produced by the monopolist has n quality dimensions."