The relationship between physician and patient has been discussed intensively in the literature. Nevertheless, they neglect the fact that the production of health not only depends on the medical services supplied by the physician but is also influenced by the patient's compliance. We present a...

We investigate the problem of subsidising afforestation when private information exists with respect to the level of private utility derived from the project. We develop a simple model that allows for an intelligent design of contracts when information is asymmetric. The model involves the...

Environmental policy often has to be devised under informational constraints, like uncertainty and asymmetric information. We consider an environmental policy that aims at reducing the welfare losses caused by asymmetric information while being sufficiently simple for implementation. In this...

We examine a situation where efforts on different tasks positively affect production but are not separately verifiable and where the manager (principal) and the worker (agent) have different ideas about how production should be carried out: agents prefer a less efficient way of production. We...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

Should principals explain and justify their evaluations? In this paper the principal's evaluation is private information, but she can provide some justifications by sending a costly message. Indeed, it is optimal for the principal to explain her evaluation to the agent if and only if the...

We explore the role of firms in insuring non-verifiable output. As a device that allows workers to commit to thedelivery of their output, the firm arises endogenously as an alternative to the market if workers are sufficiently riskaverse and the firm can base its incentive payments on good...

We develop a theory of leadership that focuses on the role managersplay in motivating employees through their attitude towards employees. We modela manager's attitude as her perception about employees' abilities of successfullycompleting challenging tasks. We show that a positive attitude...

During the last years the relationship between financial development and economic growth has received widespread attention in the literature on growth and development. This paper summarises in its first part the results of this research, stressing the growth-enhancing effects of an increased...

In dynamic principal-agent relationships, it is sometimes observed that the agent's reward depends only on the final outcome. For example, a student's grade in a course quite often depends only on the final exam score, where the performance in the problem sets and the mid-term exam is ignored....