This paper studies strategic delegation in two-player contests for an indivisible prize (as in, e.g. litigation) where one party's probability of winning is determined by the relative investments of both. Even though neither player stands to gain anything from the possibility of one player...

The continuous-time principal-agent model with exponential utility developed by Holmström and Milgrom (1987) and generalized by Schättler and Sung (1993, 1996) and Sung (1995) admits a simple closed-form solution: The second-best sharing rule is linear in output. Unfortunately, the first-best...

Would you go to the dentist more often if it were free? Observational data is here used to analyze the impact of full-coverage insurance on dental care utilization using different identification strategies. The challenge of assessing the bite of moral hazard without an experimental study design...

This paper analyzes optimal insurance against unemployment and disability in a private information economy with endogenous health and search effort. Individuals can reduce the probability of becoming disabled by exerting, so-called, prevention effort, which is costly in terms of utility. A...

In this paper a persuasion game is analyzed, where "persuasion" is understood as an interested party's acquisition and transmission of information to a decision maker. The model allows for many interpretations, e.g., political lobbying or influence activities in organizations. Individuals' ex...

Payments in kind pose an enduring and empirically important puzzle. The paper provides a formalization of the popular view that payment in kind are due to financial constraints. The key assumption is that buyers' liquidity is private information. Buyers who are financially constrained may prove...

We present a model of financial contracting in the presence of asymmetric information between entrepreneur and investor. Either liquidation threat or governance control can be used to protect investor’s interests against expropriation risk. The two parties first agree to a financial...

We consider Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanisms for resolving conflicts between two agents who are uncertain about each other's fighting potential. We model the default option of outright conflict as a probabilistic contest. Examples of such contests may be...

In this paper we study a sender-receiver game between an uninformed government and two informed lobbyists. There is a conflict of interest between government and lobbyists in the sense that the government's payoff is state-dependent while lobbyists prefer a certain policy irrespective of the...

Consider team production with two people. Each is characterized by a prior distribution that he will do Right or Wrong. After the outcome of the project is observed, these probabilities are updated. When output depends on the weakest link in production, following project failure the posterior...