This paper analyzes a bilateral trade problem where the seller makes hidden investment that influences the buyer's private valuation. Complete contracts can be written on observable trade decisions. It is shown that efficiency level in investment and trade is negatively related to the scope of...

This paper shows that monitoring too much a partner in the initial phase of a relationship may not be optimal if the goal is to determine his loyalty to the match and if the cost of ending the relationship increases over time. The intuition is simple: by monitoring too much we learn less on how...

This paper is an adaptation of the Chamley-Gale endogenous-timing information-revelation model of investment (Econometrica 1994). It models a game with pure informational externality where agents can learn by observing others' actions. The social learning can result in herding and possibly in an...

A firm can merge with one of n potential partners. The owner of each firm has private information about both his firm's stand-alone value and a component of the synergies that would be realized by the merger involving his firm. We characterize incentive-efficient mechanisms in two cases. First,...

We first point out that, using any of the current criteria for comparing information systems in principal-agent models with moral hazard (such as Kim (1994)'s criterion), it is often impossible to contrast the value of information obtained from different policies of contingent audits that bear...

This paper studies an internet trading mechanism similar to the one described in Peters and Severinov (2001) in a market where traders values are interdependent. It is shown that under reasonable conditions this mechanism has a perfect Bayesian equilibrium which supports allocations that...

In this paper I describe group theoretic methods that can be used for analyzing the boundary problems, which arise when the Hamiltonian method is applied to solve the relaxed problem for the multidimensional screening problem. This technique can provide some useful insights into the structure of...

Willig (1976) argues that the change in consumer's surplus is often a good approximation to the willingness to pay for a price change: if the income elasticity of demand is small, or the price change is small, then the percentage error from using consumer's surplus is small. If the price of a...