This paper develops an empirical strategy to measure maverick-like behaviour. It applies the strategy to a dataset that contains interest rates charged by mortgage providers in Australia from January 2003 to October 2006. The Reserve Bank of Australia raised its cash rate five times in this...

The winners of auctions for pubic-private partnership contracts, especially for major infrastructure projects such as highways, often enter financial distress, requiring the concession to be reallocated or renegotiated. We build a simple model to identify the causes and consequences of such...

A government delegates a build-operate-transfer project to a private firm in a limited-commitment framework. When the contract is signed, parties are uncertain about the operating cost. The firm can increase the likelihood of facing a low cost by exerting some noncontractible effort while...

We provide a first contribution to analyze how agency problems within the private consortium (i.e., imperfect bundling of private tasks) affect the performance of public–private partnerships (PPPs). When both public–private and private–private contracts are incomplete, the profit-sharing...

We build on the existing literature in public-private partnerships (PPP) to analyze the main incentive issues in PPPs and the shape of optimal contracts in those contexts. We present a basic model of procurement in a multitask environment in which a risk-averse firm chooses noncontractible...

This paper analyzes the contracting out of public services through public-private partnerships (PPP) subject to government opportunism. In PPP, the building of public infra-structure and the provision of related services are procured through only one contract. On the one hand, such bundling of...

This paper studies a sales mechanism, prevalent in housing markets, where the seller does not reveal or commit to a reserve price but instead publicly announces an asking price. We show that the seller sets an asking price such that, in equilibrium, buyers of certain types would accept it with...

This paper investigates the impact of two commonly used asking price strategies on house sales prices. In particular, we compare a dynamic asking price, where the seller adjusts her asking price over time as she fails to sell her property, with a static asking price, where the seller sets an...

This paper investigates the optimal environmental policy (the mix of emissions tax and R&D subsidy) when two firms, producing differentiated products, compete in the output market over time. Firms compete over supply schedules, which encompasses a continuum of market structures from Bertrand to...