Agents and Brokers as Intermediaries: Their Regulation in Germany

Most markets are characterized by imperfections, mostly market power and limited information. Under these circumstances, intermediaries like real estate agents and insurance brokers play an important role in the economy by facilitating exchange between third parties. As specialized entities they can transmit information, thereby lessening information asymmetries between market participants and can thus enhance the functioning of markets. This special role allows for opportunistic behavior by intermediaries, though. As long as the parties can write enforceable contracts that cover the relevant aspects of the intermediaries behavior, legal regulation is not necessary. In this paper it will be shown, though, that contracts are only partially able to solve possible principalagent problems and that the current legal rules in Germany are inefficient as they can not sufficiently control possible opportunistic behavior. A system of legal rules for intermediaries is sketched, taking into account that severe informa-tional asymmetry is more likely to arise if transactions are infrequent and learning does not take place.

Measurement of electroweak WZ boson production and search for new physics in WZ + two jets events in pp collisions at √s=13TeV

A measurement of WZ electroweak (EW) vector boson scattering is presented. The measurement is performed in the leptonic decay modes WZ→ℓνℓ′ℓ′, where ℓ,ℓ′=e,μ. The analysis is based on a data sample of proton-proton collisions at √s=13 TeV at the LHC collected with the CMS detector and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb−1. The WZ plus two jet production cross section is measured in fiducial regions with enhanced contributions from EW production and found to be consistent with standard model predictions. The EW WZ production in association with two jets is measured with an observed (expected) significance of 2.2 (2.5) standard deviations. Constraints on charged Higgs boson production and on anomalous quartic gauge couplings in terms of dimension-eight effective field theory operators are also presented