We solve the principal-agent problem of a monopolist insurer selling to an agent whose riskiness (chance of a loss) is private information, a problem introduced in Stiglitz (1977)'s seminal paper. We prove several properties of optimal menus: the highest type gets full coverage (efficiency at...

We solve the principal-agent problem of a monopolist insurer selling to an agent whose riskiness (loss chance) is private information, a problem introduced in Stiglitz's (1977) seminal paper. For an \emph{arbitrary} type distribution, we prove several properties of optimal menus, such as...

Expected consumer's surplus rarely represents preferences over price lotteries. Still, I give sufficient conditions for policies which maximize aggregate expected surplus to be interim Pareto Optimal. Besides two standard partial equilibrium conditions, I assume that feasible prices satisfy a...

I show that local changes in five welfare measures are equal: a measure proposed by Radner (1993); consumers' surplus; the Slutsky change in real wealth; the Divisia quantity index, and Debreu's (1951) coefficient of resource utilization (the last two rescaled in units of a numeraire good)

We offer a new, succinct proof that the money metric utility is concave for any preference relation representable by a concave function if and only if the indirect utility is affine in wealth. The proof exploits the existence of a least concave representation established in Debreu (1976), a...

We consider the effect of information on the ex ante average risk-free rate and the equity premium in a standard exchange economy with a representative agent. We show that information always increases the average risk-free rate. Clearly, perfect information eliminates the equity premium;...

This paper proposes a simple index of the welfare significance of uncertainty in the public goods resulting as policy outcomes. Our measure is the ex ante compensation an individual would require to accept an uncertain level of service compared to receiving the expected value of the distribution...

An incumbent monopolist is uncertain about its linear demand, but can acquire information at a cost. We determine how an entry threat affects the firm's information acquisition. This effect depends on what the entrant observes about the incumbent's information choice. We consider all four...

This paper revisits the well-known result of Radner and Stiglitz (1984) which shows that, under certain conditions, the value of information exhibits increasing marginal returns over some range. Their result assumes that both the number of states and the number of signal realizations are finite,...