This paper shows that the possibility of collusion between an agent and a supervisor imposes no restrictions on the set of implementable social choice functions (SCF) and associated payoff vectors. Any SCF and any payoff profile that are implementable if the supervisor's information was public...

We analyze a monopolist who offers different variants of a possibly dangerous product to heterogeneous customers. Product variants are distinguished by different safety attributes. Customers choose product usage which co- determines expected harm. We find that, even with customers being...

We analyze the optimal allocation of authority in an organization whose members have conflicting preferences. One party has decision-relevant private information, and the party who obtains authority decides in a self-interested way. As a novel element in the literature on decision rights, we...

In markets with quality unobservable to buyers, third-party certification is often the only instrument to increase transparency. While both sellers and buyers have a demand for certification, its role differs fundamentally: sellers use it for signaling, buyers use it for inspection. Seller...

Motivated by the financial crisis of 2007-2009 several papers have provided explanations for why liquidity may dry up during market stress. This paper also looks at this issue but focuses on the question as to why the liquidity crunch was not uniform across maturities. As funding pressures were...

We propose a simple model of borrower optimism in competitive lending markets with asymmetric information. Borrowers in our model engage in self-deception to arrive at a belief that optimally trades off the anticipatory utility benefits and material costs of optimism. Lenders' contract design...

We study contracting between a public good provider and users with private valuations of the good. We show that, once the provider extracts the users' private information, she benefits from manipulating the collective information received from all users when communicating with them. We derive...