The winners of auctions for pubic-private partnership contracts, especially for major infrastructure projects such as highways, often enter financial distress, requiring the concession to be reallocated or renegotiated. We build a simple model to identify the causes and consequences of such...

A government delegates a build-operate-transfer project to a private firm in a limited-commitment framework. When the contract is signed, parties are uncertain about the operating cost. The firm can increase the likelihood of facing a low cost by exerting some noncontractible effort while...

We provide a first contribution to analyze how agency problems within the private consortium (i.e., imperfect bundling of private tasks) affect the performance of public–private partnerships (PPPs). When both public–private and private–private contracts are incomplete, the profit-sharing...

We build on the existing literature in public-private partnerships (PPP) to analyze the main incentive issues in PPPs and the shape of optimal contracts in those contexts. We present a basic model of procurement in a multitask environment in which a risk-averse firm chooses noncontractible...

This paper analyzes the contracting out of public services through public-private partnerships (PPP) subject to government opportunism. In PPP, the building of public infra-structure and the provision of related services are procured through only one contract. On the one hand, such bundling of...

This paper studies the structure of state-contingent contracts in the presence of moral hazard and multitasking. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the presence of multitasking to lead to fixed payments instead of incentive schemes are identified. It is shown that the primary determinant of...

In this paper, we extend the state-contingent production approach to principal-agent problems to the case where the state space is an atomless continuum. The approach is modelled on the treatment of optimal tax problems. The central observation is that, under reasonable conditions, the optimal...