Ever since the seminal work by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) on competitive insurance markets under adverse selection the equilibrium-non-existence problem has been one of the major puzzles in insurance economics. We extend the original analysis by considering firms that face capacity...

We examine the role of security design when lenders make inefficient accept-or-reject decisions after screening projects. Lenders may be either 'too conservative', in which case they reject positive-NPV projects. Or they may be 'too aggressive', in which case they accept negative-NPV projects....

This article shows that investors financing a portfolio of projects may use the depth of their financial pockets to overcome entrepreneurial incentive problems. Competition for scarce informed capital at the refinancing stage strengthens investors' bargaining positions. And yet, entrepreneurs'...

This paper considers a competitive search market where sellers have private information about a good's quality. It is shown that separation of types may arise naturally if high-quality sellers derive a greater utility from search than low-quality sellers. For instance, sellers of high-quality...

In a seminal paper, Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) show that competitive markets with incomplete information in which firms offer contracts to screen privately informed agents may have no equilibrium. In this paper, we argue that frictions in the form of delay or congestion provide a natural...

We analyze bilateral bargaining with one-sided offers where the buyer has private information about his valuation but does not know whether the seller is committed to a known fixed price or whether it pays to hold out until he possibly reduces his offer. We make the `gap' assumption that there...

We consider bargaining between a seller and a buyer with private information about his valuation. We introduce the novel feature that with some probability a new buyer may visit the seller's shop each period, which grants the seller the option to switch to a new trading partner. We analyze the...

In an internal capital market, individual departments may compete for a share of the firm's budget by engaging in wasteful influence activities. We show that firms with more levels of hierarchy may experience lower influence costs than less hierarchical firms, even though the former provide more...

This paper presents a theory of integration based on the inability of parties to write comprehensive financial contracts. In our model, integration entails both benefits and costs. On the one hand, integration involves liquidity spillovers between projects ensuring that integrated firms can...

We consider a game of signaling where the informed sender proposes a contract, which can only be accepted or rejected by the receiver. While most of the literature considers a bilaterally monopolistic setting, we embed the game in a search market environment where a sender may switch to another...