In a Baron-Myerson setup, we study a situation where an agent is initially uninformed, but can, at a cost, acquire information about the state of nature before the principal offers him a contract. For intermediate values of the cost of acquiring information, the agent's equilibrium strategy will...

This paper studies the optimal direct/indirect tax mix in a setting where individuals differ in several unobservable characteristics (productivity and endowments). Tax instruments (income and commodity taxes) are constrained solely by the information structure.

Par un modele aussi simple que possible, nous essayons de capturer les raisons pour lesquelles plus de 40 millions d'Americains (Hellander et al., 1995) renoncent a s'assurer contre la maladie. Nous utilisons ensuite notre modele pour evaluer les effets qu'aurait eue l'introduction , prevue dans...

This paper extends the Atkinson-Stiglitz model of direct and indirect taxation to a dynamic setting with two unobservable characteristics: productive ability and inherited wealth.Bequests are motivated by the "joy of giving".

We study how optimal contracts are modified when the agent has the possibility to acquire information before the contract is offered to him. We consider a situation in which this information is always available to the agent just before producing. Therefore, prior information acquisition is...

The shares of the public sector in health insurance provision varies enormously from country to country. It is larger in more redistributive countries. We provide a possible theoretical explanation for these facts: a public health insurance system, financed by taxes, can be an efficient means of...

Payment card associations offer both debit and credit cards and sometimes engage in a tie-in on the merchant side through the so-called honor-all-cards (HAC) rule. This article analyzes the impact of the HAC rule, using a simple model with two types of transactions subject to different...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the papers in this publication discuss from different...

This note elaborates on a recent article by Chan, Greenbaum and Thakor (1992) who contend that fairly priced deposit insurance is incompatible with free competition in the banking sector, in the presence of adverse selection. We show here that at soon as one introduces a real economic motivation...