This paper derives a central bank’s optimal liquidity supply towards a money market with an unrestricted lending facility. We show that when the effect of liquidity on market rates is not too small, and the monetary authority cares for both interest rates and liquidity conditions, then the...

A global signaling game is a sender-receiver game in which the sender is only imperfectly informed about the receiver's preferences. The paper considers an economically relevant class of signaling games that possess more than one Perfect Bayesian equilibrium. For this class of games, it is shown...

It is well known that ex-ante randomization can improve upon second best contracts in principal-agent problems. In this note, we show that even the ¯rst{best can be dominated by a random contract. Our example is cast in a standard textbook set-up with two e®ort levels and two states of nature.

The paper analyzes the infinite-horizon alternating-offers bargaining game between agents with inequity-averse preferences. Without prior investments, the model predicts a shift of the outcome towards equal division. Asymmetric investments affect the ex-post bargaining outcome, giving an...

When investments are specific to a relationship and contracting possibilities are incomplete, the efficiency of a joint venture may be severely impaired by ex-post opportunistic and hold-up type behavior. How is the logic of this argument affected by inequity aversion? In this paper I show that...

Kolstad, Ulen and Johnson (1990) have conjectured that exclusive use of negligence liability leads to suboptimal choice of precaution in the presence of uncertainty and that ex ante regulation can correct these inefficiencies. We complete their argument by making a mild additional premise.

In a pioneering approach towards the explanation of the phenomenon of "yes man" behavior in organizations, Prendergast (1993) argued that incentive contracts in employment relationships generally make a worker distort his privately acquired information. This would imply that there is a trade-off...

This paper offers a non-technical discussion of the literature on the theoretical foundations of the incomplete contracting approach.

In this paper we discuss "lock in effects" and "hold-up problems" (which occur when relationship-specific investments are sunk).

It is shown that a Bayesian decision maker is cautious in generic decision situations. Formally, we prove that in almost all decisions under uncertainty every Bayesian mixed best reply to a subjective prior as actually a best reply to prior that gives positive probability to every possible state...