Risk-neutral sellers can extract high profits from risk-loving buyers by selling them lotteries. To limit this problem, gambling is heavily regulated in most countries. I show that protecting risk-loving buyers against profit-maximizing sellers is essentially impossible. Even if buyers are...

This paper studies the costs and benefits of delegating decisions to superiorly informed agents relative to the use of rigid, non discretionary contracts. Delegation grants some flexibility in the choice of the action by the agent, but also requires the use of an appropriate incentive contract...

This paper presents a theory in which risk-averse heterogeneously talented entrepreneurs are the key agents driving the process of development and modernisation. Entrepreneurial skills are private information, which prevents full risk sharing. In that setup, development to a modern industrial...

This paper investigates the determinants of board compensation for a sample of Italian State Owned Enterprises (SOEs). To that purpose, we use a newly collected panel data of 106 local public utilities observed form 1994 through 2004, which includes detailed information on the boards of...

Health insurance in the United States is typically acquired through an employer-sponsored program. Often an employee offerred employer-provided health insurance has the option to extend coverage to their spouse and dependents. We investigate the implications of the “publicness” of health...

We empirically model individual utility from pay as function of worker’s own wage and the earnings of all other workers within the same establishment. The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to study the mechanisms underlying the importance of relative wages in determining worker...

Little is known about the effects of revealing information on relative performance during a dynamic tournament. We empirically study the impact of interim rank on risk taking and performance using data on professionals competing in tournaments for large rewards. As our data allows us to observe...

We solve a mean-variance optimisation problem of a defined contribution pension scheme in the accumulation phase. The financial market consists of: (i) the risk-free asset, (ii) a risky asset following a GBM, and (iii) a bond driven by a stochastic interest rate following the Vasicek [1977]...

How is cooperation without immediate reciprocity sustained in a long term relationship? We study the case of two players in continuous time who have privately observable opportunities to provide favors, and where the arrival of these opportunities is a Poisson process. Favors provided by a...

When there is uncertainty about interest rates (typically due to either illiquidity or defaultability of zero coupon bonds) the cash- additivity assumption on risk measures becomes problematic. When this assumption is weakened, to cash-subadditivity for example, the equivalence between convexity...