Showing 1 - 10 of 478
We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014076462
We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012750944
This paper extends the job market signaling model of Spence (1973) by allowing firms to learn the ability of their employees over time. Contrary to the model without employer learning, we find that the Intuitive Criterion does not always select a unique separating equilibrium. When the Intuitive...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013324859
We study the choice of a principal to either delegate a decision to a group of careerist experts, or to consult them individually and keep the decision-making power. Our model predicts a trade-off between information acquisition and information aggregation. On the one hand, the expected benefit...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014254511
We analyze a long-term contracting problem involving common uncertainty about a parameter capturing the productivity of the relationship, and featuring a hidden action for the agent. We develop an approach that works for any utility function when the parameter and noise are normally distributed...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013135822
This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents learn by doing. We derive a condition under which contracts are fully incentive compatible. A closed-form solution is obtained when agents have CARA utility. It shows that human capital accumulation...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013058309
In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013087422
Empirical literature on moral hazard focuses exclusively on the direct impact of asymmetric information on market outcomes, thus ignoring possible repercussions. We present a field experiment in which we consider a phenomenon that we call second-degree moral hazard – the tendency of the supply...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013061956
The 'ratchet effect' refers to a situation where a principal uses private information that is revealed by an agent's early actions to the agent's later disadvantage, in a context where binding multi-period contracts are not enforceable. In a simple, context-rich environment, we experimentally...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013324885
Case studies of cartels and recent theory suggest that repeated communication is key for stable cooperation in … environments where signals about others' actions are noisy. However, empirically the exact role of communication is not well … understood. We study cooperation under different monitoring and communication structures in the laboratory. Under all monitoring …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012908872