Firms' incentives to form research joint ventures (RJVs) are analysed in an incomplete information framework when technological know-how is private information. Firms first decide on cooperation and information revelation and then compete for a patent. Provided that spillovers exist in the case...

A student's future log-wage is given by the sum of a skill premium and a random personal ‘ability’ term. Students observe only a private, noisy signal of their ability, and universities can condition admission decisions on the results of noisy tests. We assume first that universities are...

This Paper provides a sufficient condition for the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in monotone pure strategies, in games of incomplete information. First, we show that if each player's incremental ex post pay-off is uniformly increasing in its own action and type, and its type is...

A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...

We characterize the divergence between in informational and economic efficiency in a rational expectations competitive market with asymmetric information about the costs of production. We find that prices may contain too much or too little information with respect o incentive efficient...

We consider a setting in which two potential merger partners each possess private information pertaining both to the profitability of the merged entity and to stand-alone profits, and investigate the extent to which this private information makes ex-post regret an unavoidable phenomenon in...

We completely characterize the set of second-best optimal "menus" of student-loan contracts in a simple economy with risky labour-market outcomes, adverse selection, moral hazard and risk aversion. The model combines structured student loans and an elementary optimal income-tax problem à la...

We develop general recursive methods to solve for optimal contracts in dynamic principal-agent environments with hidden states and hidden actions. In our baseline model, the principal observes nothing other than transfers. Nevertheless, optimal incentive-constrained insurance can be attained. We...

Consider a revenue-maximizing seller who can sell an object to one of n potential buyers. Each buyer either has hard information about his valuation (i.e., evidence that cannot be forged) or is ignorant. The optimal mechanism is characterized. It turns out that more ignorance can increase the...

We analyse the optimal delegation of decision rights by a uninformed principal to an informed but biased agent. When the principal cannot use message-contingent transfers, she offers the agent a set of decisions from which he can choose his preferred one. We fully characterize the optimal...