This paper examines the conditions for credit volume or borrower rationing in a competitive credit market in which the project characteristics are private information of the borrowers. There can only be credit volume rationing if the higher-risk credit applicants have a higher return in the...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) show that there need not exist a competitive equilibrium in markets with adverse selection. Building on their framework we demonstrate that externalities between agents - an agent's utility upon accepting a contract depends on the average type attracted by the...

Charness and Dufwenberg (American Economic Review, June 2011, 1211-1237) have recently demonstrated that cheap-talk communication raises efficiency in bilateral contracting situations with adverse selection. We replicate their finding and check its robustness by introducing competition between...

We examine insurance markets with two types of customers: those who regret suboptimal decisions and those who don.t. In this setting, we characterize the equilibria under hidden information about the type of customers and hidden action. We show that both pooling and separating equilibria can...

Micro data from a dental insurance natural experiment is used to analyze why agents opt out of insurance. The purpose is to relate the dropout decision to new information on risk, acquired by the policy holder and the insurer. The results show that agents tend to leave the insurance when...

The empirical evidence of adverse selection in insurance markets is mixed. The problem in assessing the extent of adverse selection is that private information, on which agents act, is generally unobservable to the researcher, which makes it difficult to distinguish between adverse selection and...

Would you go to the dentist more often if it were free? Observational data is here used to analyze the impact of full-coverage insurance on dental care utilization using different identification strategies. The challenge of assessing the bite of moral hazard without an experimental study design...

When health plans compete under adverse selection, the competitive equilibrium set of contracts is unique. However, the allocation of these contracts among health plans is undetermined. We show that three health plans suffice to sustain an equilibrium where each health plan offers a single...