This paper provides new analytical tools for studying principal-agent problems with adverse selection and limited commitment. By allowing the principal to use general communication devices we overcome the literature's common, but overly restrictive focus on one-shot, direct communication. In...

A seller of a divisible good faces several identical buyers. The quality of the good may be low or high, and is the seller's private information. The seller has strictly convex preferences that satisfy a single-crossing property. Buyers compete by posting menus of nonexclusive contracts, so that...

Consider a seller of a divisible good, facing several identical buyers. The quality of the good may be low or high, and is the seller's private information. The seller has strictly convex preferences that satisfy a single-crossing property. Buyers compete by posting arbitrary menus of contracts....

Using an agency model, we show how delegation, by generating additional private information, improves dynamic incentives under limited commitment. It circumvents ratchet effects and facilitates the revelation of persistent private information through two effects: a play-hardball effect, which...

We study a nonexclusive insurance market with adverse selection in which insurers compete through simple contract offers. Multiple contracting endogenously emerges in equilibrium. Different layers of coverage are priced fairly according to the types of insurees who purchase them, giving rise to...

We study a nonexclusive insurance market with adverse selection in which insurers compete through simple contract offers. Multiple contracting endogenously emerges in equilibrium. Different layers of coverage are priced fairly according to the types of insurees who purchase them, giving rise to...

Many financial markets rely on a discriminatory limit-order book to balance supply and demand. We study these markets in a static model in which uninformed market makers compete in nonlinear tariffs to trade with an informed insider, as in Glosten (1994), Biais, Martimort, and Rochet (2000), and...

A seller of a divisible good faces several identical buyers. The quality of the good may be low or high, and is the seller's private information. The seller has strictly convex preferences that satisfy a single-crossing property. Buyers compete by posting menus of nonexclusive contracts, so that...

We study contracting between a public good provider and users with private valuations of the good. We show that, once the provider extracts the users' private information, she benefits from manipulating the collective information received from all users when communicating with them. We derive...

We study information flows in an organization with a top management (principal) and multiple subunits (agents) with private information that determines the organization's aggregate efficiency. Under centralization, eliciting the agents' private information may induce the principal to manipulate...