We investigate investment behavior when there is asymmetry of information between owners (the principal) and managers (the agent). The model accepts the standard cost-of-adjustment model as a particular case and is directly compared with it. For all types, information asymmetry distorts the...

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...

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...

Suppose an entrepreneur needs funds from a financier to invest in a risky project whose cost is fixed, and whose return may be high or low. Suppose also that the project's realized return is an information that is private to the entrepreneur. If the amount the entrepreneur pays back to the...

The recent automobile liability insurance crisis in Atlantic Canada has prompted the four provincial legislations (Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island) to setup a task force to redesign, if necessary, the personal automobile insurance system. After...

We show that information asymmetry may not cause any distortion in product differentiation. This contrasts with the main result of the literature on signaling which stresses that information asymmetry has a non negligible impact on strategic behavior. A thorough analysis of the...

We characterize the distortions in environmental liability sharing between firms and banks that the imperfect implementation of government policies implies. These distortions stem from three factors: the presence of moral hazard, the use of objective functions by firms and banks that differs...

Using a structural model of the interactions between governments, firms and insurance companies, we characterise the distortions in environmental liability sharing between firms and insurance companies that the imperfect implementation of government policies implies. These distortions stem from...

We focus in this paper on the effects of court errors on the optimal sharing of liability between firms and financiers, as an environmental policy instrument. Using a structural model of the interactions between firms, financial institutions, governments and courts we show, through numerical...