We investigate regulation as the outcome of a bargaining process between a regulator and a regulated firm. The regulator is required to monitor the firm's costs and reveal its information to a political principal (Congress). In this setting, we explore the scope for collusion between the...

In an industry where regulated firms interact with unregulated suppliers, we investigate the welfare effects of a merger between regulated firms when cost synergies are uncertain before the merger and their realization becomes private information of the merged firm. The optimal merger policy...

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...

The paper starts with a description of major reforms of EU policy in the network industries. Based on the normative economics of regulation, it then points out generic information and transaction cost problems of regulatory policy making. An appropriate allocation of regulatory competencies may...

We study the regulation of a monopolistic firm that provides a non-marketed output based on multiple substitutable inputs. The regulator is able to observe the effectiveness of the provision, but faces information asymmetries with respect to the efficiency of the firm’s activities. Motivated...

We study the efficiency of banking regulation under financial integration. Banks freely choose the jurisdiction where to locate their activities and have private information about their efficiency level. Regulators non-cooperatively offer any regulatory contract that satisfies information and...

We study a credence goods problem - that is, a moral hazard problem with non-contractible outcome - where altruistic experts (the agents) care both about their income and the utility of consumers (the principals). Experts' preferences over income and their consumers' utility are convex, such...

This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents' production technologies display learning effects and agents' rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show that...