Consider an agent who can costlessly add mean-preserving noise to his output. To deter such risk-taking, the principal optimally offers a contract that makes the agent's utility concave in output. If the agent is risk-neutral and protected by limited liability, this concavity constraint binds...

This paper provides a complete characterization of equilibria in a game-theoretic version of Rothschild and Stiglitz's (1976) model of competitive insurance. I allow for stochastic contract offers by insurance firms and show that a unique symmetric equilibrium always exists. Exact conditions...

A buyer makes an offer to a privately informed seller for a good of uncertain quality. Quality determines both the seller's valuation and the buyer's valuation, and the buyer evaluates each contract according to its worst-case performance over a set of probability distributions. This paper...

The theory of incentives and matching theory can complement each other. In particular, matching theory can be a tool for analyzing optimal incentive contracts within a general equilibrium framework. We propose several models that study the endogenous payoffs of principals and agents as a...

This paper demonstrates how the contract theory framework can and should complement standard financial mathematics for analysing Islamic financial securities (IFSs). It is motivated by the perception that most valuations of IFSs are rather simplistic and are as simple as risk and reward, leading...

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...