Venture capitalists enjoy incentive-laden compensation schemes where they are paid a fixed amount (management fees) plus a share of profit (success fees). This scheme is of course intended to provide venture capitalists with strong incentives under the heavy information asymmetry (Sahlman, 1982,...

Credit sharing information mechanisms represent the institutional answer to the asymmetric information problems inherent to credit markets. It is generally accepted that sharing information is beneficial for the participant institutions, however, there are few studies that have measured the...

In this article we write a two period taxation model where: \QTR{it}{i)} private information changes through time; \QTR{it}{ii)} savings choices by an agent that are not observed, \QTR{it}{iii)} affect preferences conditional on the realization of types. The simultaneous appearance of these three...

Punitive damage awards have been widely criticized for their unpredictability (2004 Economic Report of the President) and for generating a plaintiff’s windfall (i.e., a payment in excess of the costs of pursuing the punitive claim), which promotes unnecessary litigation (Dodson, 2000),...

In an attempt to reduce the liability insurance costs of firms, several US states have implemented many different kinds of tort reform. Some reforms take the form of caps or limits on punitive damage awards while others have mandated that a proportion of the award be allocated to the plaintiff...

People care not only about how much they are paid, but also about what they do. The aim of this paper is to investigate the interplay between an individual's personal motivation and the structure of dynamic incentive schemes. The optimal long-term contract involves not only transfers at each...

How do informational asymmetries between bidders affect the outcome of common value auctions? Should the seller accept bids from bidders with more precise information? If so, under what conditions? What effect do such asymmetries have on the seller’s expected revenue? We analyze these...

We consider parametric examples of two-bidder private value auctions in which each bidder observes her own private valuation as well as noisy signals about her opponent’s private valuation. In such multidimensional private value auction environments, we show that the revenue equivalence...