In a property-rights framework, I study how organizational form and quantity contracts interact in generating investment incentives. The model nests standard property-rights and hold-up models as special cases. I admit general message-dependent contracts, but provide conditions under which...

In this paper we consider the problem of financing infrastructure when the regulator faces a budget constraint. The optimal budget-constrained mechanism satisfies four properties. The first property is bunching at the top, that is the more efficient firms produce the same quantity. The second...

This article studies the problem of regulating a monopolist with unknown marginal cost. The originality of the paper is to consider that the regulator faces a cash-in-advance constraint. The introduction of such a constraint not only reduces the amount of public good provided but also limits the...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

This paper addresses the question of delegation in a partial contracting set-up, where only the control over actions is contractible. We consider an organization that should take two decisions, affected by a common state of the world parameter only known by the agent. We show that, if the...

In multiple-task hidden-action models, the (mis-)allocation of effort may play an important role for benefit creation. Signals which capture this benefit and which are used in incentive schemes should thus not only be judged by the noise and the associated costs but also by the mis-allocation...

The present paper aims to contribute to the literature on the foundations of incomplete contracts by providing conditions under which simple delegation of authority is the solution to the complete-contracting problem of the parties. We consider a hold-up framework where both parties profit from...

We present a common value mechanism design model for an informed principal where only the principal has private information, but her one-dimensional private information is allowed to be distributed according to any probability measure. For this model we characterize the set of pure-strategy...

We consider the situation where the owner of some good wants to sell the good to one of several potential buyers. We assume that the owner possesses private information about the buyers' valuations of the good, and analyze this model as an informed principal mechanism design model. In an...

The standard state-spaces of asymmetric information preclude non- trivial forms of unawareness (Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini, 1998). We introduce a generalized state-space model that allows for non-trivial unawareness among several individuals, and which satisfies strong properties of knowledge...