The paper addresses the effect of technological progress on the frontiers of the firm, building on transaction cost theory and agency theory. The model incorporates four types of costs: production, coordination, management, and transaction costs. The market has lower production costs, but higher...

We provide a continuum of subsidy rules based on a performance indicator that induce a monopoly to choose the socially optimal production level. These subsidy rules result in a reduction of the amount of subsidy paid to the monopolist compared to the standard case where a constant subsidy rate...

We model the interactions between management regimes (municipal vs. delegated) and operating costs of water supply services in order to compare their performance and pricing. We estimate the models from panel data in France. We show that the choice between management regimes at the local...

We analyze duopolistic competition between horizontally differentiated firms selling durable goods or services subject to congestion. At each point of time, new customers buy one unit of the commodity from one of the firms, by comparing present prices and future congestion rates. We study the...

Two firms produce a good with a horizontal and a vertical characteristic called quality. The difference in the unobservable quality levels determines how the firms share the market. We consider two scenarios: In the first one, firms disclose quality; in the second one, they send costly signals...

We provide an experimental analysis of competitive insurance markets with adverse selection. Our parameterized version of the lemons' model (Akerlof 1970) in the insurance context predicts total crowding out of low-risks when insurers offer a single full insurance contract. The therapy proposed...

We analyze optimal trading mechanisms in environments where each trader owns some units of a good to be traded and may be either a seller or a buyer, depending on the realization of privately observed valuations. First, the concept of virtual valuation is extended to ex ante unidentified...

This paper examines how different rules for presentation of evidence affect verdicts in regulatory hearings and the welfare and efficiency properties these procedures exhibit. The hearing is modeled as a game of imperfect information in which the respondent is privately informed about validity...

Our objective in this paper is to illustrate and better understand the unavoidable arbitrage between incentives and flexibility in contexts of asymmetric information and to characterize the general features of an appropriate response to this challenge. We show that procedures and institutions in...

This paper studies the implications of non-commitment for organizational design. An organizational form must trade-off between the coordination benefits associated with the centralization of information and its associated costs in terms of renegotiation. This analysis makes precise what these...