We study an economy where intermediaries compete over contracts in a nonexclusive insurance market affected by moral hazard. In this context, we show that, contrarily to what is commonly believed, market equilibria may fail to be efficient even if the planner is not allowed to enforce...

The present paper thoroughly explores second-best efficient allocations in an insurance economy with adverse selection. We start with a natural extension of the classical model, assuming less than perfect risk perception. We characterize the constraints on efficient redistribution, and we...

We consider a formal approach to comparative risk aversion and apply it to intertemporal choice models. This allows us to ask whether standard classes of utility functions, such as those inspired by Kihlstrom and Mirman (1974) [16], Selden (1978) [27], Epstein and Zin (1989) [10] and Quiggin...

This paper studies the relationship between competition and incentives in an economy with financial contracts. We concentrate on non-exclusive credit relationships, those where an entrepreneur can simultaneously accept more than one contractual offer. Several homogeneous lenders compete on the...

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent games of incomplete information. We identify a class of two-way communication mechanisms which mirror those considered in the single principal analysis of Myerson (1982). In such mechanisms, every agent truthfully reveals her type to all principals,...

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent models of moral hazard: principals compete through mechanisms in the presence of agents who take unobservable actions. In this context, we provide a rationale for restricting principals to make use of simple mechanisms, which correspond to direct...