For the procurement of complex goods the early exchange of information is important to avoid costly renegotiation ex post. We show that this is achieved by bilateral negotiations but not by auctions. Negotiations strictly outperforms auctions if sellers are likely to have superior information...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...

We study a general static noisy rational expectations model, where investors have private information about asset payoffs, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of...

A rational-expectations equilibrium with positive demand for financial information does exist under fully revealing asset price - contrary to a wide-held conjecture. Generalizing the common additive signal-return model with CARA utility to the family of distributions with moment generating...

This paper performs a welfare analysis of economies with private information when public information is endogenously generated and agents can condition on noisy public statistics in the rational expectations tradition. Equilibrium is not (restricted) efficient even when feasible allocations...

Private provision of public goods often takes place as a war of attrition: individuals wait until someone else volunteers and provides the good. After a certain time period, however, one individual may be randomly selected. If the individuals are uncertain about their cost of provision, but can...

This paper analyzes the effects of taxation on information acquisition and bilateral trade in decentralized markets. We show that a profit tax and a transaction tax have opposite implications for equilibrium outcome in bargaining. A marginal increase of a transaction tax increases the incentive...

There is a planning gap for CCS projects in Europe. CCS demonstration plants are not implemented as expected. This fact is at odds with optimistic valuation reports that apply socio-economic valuation criteria for climate projects. However, CCS plants are in most cases to be implemented by...

This article studies the relationship between debt policies of multinational companies (MNCs) and governments’ tax strategies. In the first part, it is shown that the ability to shift income from high- to low-tax countries affects MNCs’ financial choices. In the second part we show how...

This paper deals with the effects of tax rate uncertainty on risk-neutral and risk-averse investment behavior. We analyze effects of stochastic tax rates on both real and financial investment. It emerges that under risk neutrality as well as under risk aversion, increased tax rate uncertainty...