Joint liability loans are used in various settings, including business partnerships, agricultural cooperatives, and real estate investment. Most notably, they have been central to the microfinance model since the 1970s. Despite early promises, recent evidence suggests that joint liability has...

Time overruns are common in public works and are not confined to inherently complex tasks. One explanation advanced in this paper is that bidders can undergo unpredictable changes in production costs which generate an option value of waiting. By exploiting the real-option approach, we examine...

Drawing on the real-options theory we analyse bidding behaviour in a sealed-bid-first-score procurement auction where suppliers, facing variable production costs, must simultaneously report the contract price and the cost level at which they intend to perform the project. We show that this award...

Contracts providing payments for not developing natural areas, or for removing cropland from production, generally require long-term commitments. Landowners, however, can decide to prematurely terminate the contract when the opportunity cost of complying with conservation requirements increases....

We study the effects of granting an exit option that enables the private party to early terminate a PPP project if it turns out to be loss-making. In a continuous time setting with hidden information about stochastic operating profits, we show that a revenue-maximizing government can optimally...

We consider a long-term contractual relationship in which a buyer procures a fixed quantity of a product from a supplier and then sells it on the market. The production cost is private information and evolves randomly over time. The solution to this dynamic principal-agent problem involves a...

We develop a model of relational contracts with moral hazard and asymmetric persistent information about an employee's type. We find that the form of the optimal contract depends on the job characteristics as well as the distribution of employees' talent. Bonus contracts are more likely to be...