The paper develops a model of academic tenure based on multi-tasking and screening. A professor has two tasks, researching and teaching. We assume that researching performance is easy to measure but teaching performance is immeasurable. Then Holmtrom and Milgrom's (1991) classical muli-task...

A principal hires an agent to provide a verifiable service. Initially, the agent can exert unobservable effort to reduce his disutility from providing the service. If the agent is free to waive his right to quit, he may voluntarily sign a contract specifying an inefficiently large service level,...

The government wants an infrastructure-based public service to be provided. First, the infrastructure has to be built; subsequently, it has to be operated. Should the government bundle the building and operating tasks in a public-private partnership? Or should it choose traditional procurement,...

A buyer wants to purchase an innovative good from a seller. Both parties are risk-neutral, and payments from the buyer to the seller must be non-negative. After the contract is signed, the seller privately observes a signal, which may be informative about the seller's costs. We compare two...

The government wants two tasks to be performed. In each task, unobservable effort can be exerted by a wealth-constrained private contractor. If the government faces no binding budget constraints, it is optimal to bundle the tasks. The contractor in charge of both tasks then gets a bonus payment...

How does the probability of being involved in a renegotiation during the execution of a procurement contract affect the behavior of the interested contractors? What are its implications for the optimal contractual choice made by the buyer? We investigate these issues in a context characterized...

Do public agents undertake socially inefficient activities to protect themselves? In politically contestable markets, part of the lack of flexibility in the design and implementation of the public procurement process reflects public agents' risk adaptations to limit the political hazards from...

Are public contracts less adaptable than private contracts? Using a comprehensive set of contracts for a standard product, we compare procurement contracts in which the procurer is either a public administration or a private corporation. We find that public-to-private contracts feature more...

We analyze the implications of plausible third-party challenges to the legitimacy of a transaction for contract design. To the extent that such challenges impose reputation and transaction costs, the scrutinized agent has an incentive to choose contractual procedures that make challenges less...

This paper studies the relevance of the different factors that influence, at the territorial level, efficiency in the market for public infrastructures in Italy.