Consider a market where an informed monopolist sets the price for a good or as set with a value unknown to potential buyers. Upon observing the price, buyers may pay some cost for information about the value before deciding on purchases. To restrict buyer beliefs we generalize the idea of the...

This paper studies the innovation dynamics of an oligopolistic industry. The firms compete not only in the output market but also by engaging in productivity enhancing innovations to reduce labor costs. Rent sharing may generate productivity dependent wage differentials. Productivity growth...

This paper studies the innovation dynamics of an oligopolistic industry. The firms compete not only in the output market but also by engaging in productivity enhancing innovations to reduce labor costs. Rent sharing may generate productivity dependent wage differentials. Productivity growth...

This paper analyses the relation between authority and incentives. It extends the standard principal / agent model by a project selection stage in which the principal can either delegate the choice of project to the agent or keep the authority. The agent's subsequent choice of e ort depends both...

This paper analyzes bilateral contracting in an environment with contractual incompleteness and asymmetric information. One party (the seller) makes an unverifiable quality choice and the other party (the buyer) has private information about its valuation. A simple exit option contract, which...

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 Spence’s (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers’ productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre–employment auditing to learn workers’ productivities. We characterize the trade–offs...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumer's problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumer´s problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumer's problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...