This paper studies optimal menus of debt contracts such as secured debentures or bonds, in the presence of diversity of opinions between borrowers and lenders. We first characterize incentive compatible contracts, then prove the existence of optimal debt contracts. Finally, we are able to...

We study the screening problem that arises in a framework where, initially, the agent is privately informed about both the expected production cost and the cost variability and, at a later stage, he learns privately the cost realization. The speci c set of relevant incentive constraints, and so...

This paper examines properties of optimal poverty assistance programs under different informational environments using an income maintenance framework. To that end, we make both the income generating ability and the disutility of labor of individuals unobservable, and compare the resulting...

We examine equilibria in competitive insurance markets with adverse selection when wealth differences arise endogenously from unobservable savings or labor supply decisions. The endogeneity of wealth implies that high risk individuals may ceteris paribus exhibit the lower marginal willingness to...

In this article, the joint use of an income tax and public provision of education as instruments to achieve the government's distributional objectives are considered. Individuals differ in innate labour productivity and in aptitude to acquire skills through education. Actual labour productivity...

We study a problem of a multiproduct monopolist selling substitutable goods to a buyer with unknown valuations. Under the standard distributional assumptions we find that in the optimal menu every nontrivial contract delivers some good with certainty. Using this result we apply control-theoretic...