We study a principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection. Risk-neutral agents with limited liability have arbitrary private information about the distribution of outputs and the cost of effort. We show that under a multiplicative separability condition, the optimal mechanism...

The 2016 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their work on contract theory. Contract theory is a subfield of game theory where the conflict between the owner - the principal - and the CEO - or agent - is at the centre of interest. In the...

We investigate the optimal regulation of energy production reflecting the long-term goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. We analyze the optimal regulatory incentives to foster the development of non-emissive electricity generation when the demand for power is served either by a monopoly or by...

One-shot interaction and repeated interaction often co-exist in the real world. We study possible behavioral effects of this co-existence in a principal-agent setting, in which a principal simultaneously employs a permanent and a temporary agent. Our experimental results indicate that there is...

Der Aufsatz zeigt anhand zahlreicher Beispiele und quantitativer Analysen, dass internationale Organisationen – mehr als alle anderen staatlichen Institutionen – ein extremes Kontrolldefizit aufweisen. Umfragen belegen, dass sie andere Interessen als die Bürger haben. Sie können diese...

Using a dynamic model of the control of an infectious disease, we derive the conditions under which eradication will be optimal. When eradication is feasible, the optimal program requires either a low vaccination rate or eradication. A high vaccination rate is never optimal. Under special...

Peer reviews and rankings today are the backbone of research governance, but recently came under scrutiny. They take explicitly or implicitly agency theory as a theoretical basis. The emerging psychological economics opens a new perspective. As scholarly research is a mainly curiosity driven...

Peer reviews and rankings today are the backbone of research governance, but recently came under scrutiny. They take explicitly or implicitly agency theory as a theoretical basis. The emerging psychological economics opens a new perspective. As scholarly research is a mainly curiosity driven...

This note reports a replication study of Falk and Kosfeld's (2006) medium control treatment. In the experimental game, an agent has an endowment of 120 experimental currency units and decides how much to transfer to a principal. For every unit that the agent gives up, the principal receives two...

We develop a test for adverse selection and use it to examine private health insurance markets. In contrast to earlier papers that consider a purely private system or a system in which private insurance supplements a public system, we focus our attention on a system where privately funded health...