By signing a fixed water sharing agreement (FWSA), countries voluntarily commit to release a fixed amount of river water in exchange for an agreed compensation. We examine the vulnerability of such commitments to reduced water ows. Among all FWSAs that are acceptable to riparian countries, we...

This paper explains the multiple adoption of agriculture around ten thousand years ago, in spite of the fact that the …first farmers suffered worse health and nutrition than their hunter gatherer predecessors. If output is harder for farmers to defend, adoption may entail increased defense...

By signing an international river sharing agreement (RSA), countries voluntary commit to release water in exchange for a compensation. We examine the robustness of such commitments to reduced water flows. We focus on RSAs that satisfy core lower bounds and fairness upper bounds. We characterize...

We develop a model where a genetic test reveals whether an individual has a low or high probability of developing a disease. A costly prevention effort allows high-risk agents to decrease this probability. Agents are not obliged to take the test, but must disclose its results to insurers, and...

This paper addresses the issue of price signaling in a model of vertical relationship between a manufacturer and a retailer who share the same information about quality, unlike consumers who do not observe it a priori. We show that delegating the price setting task to a retailer and controlling...

The paper revisits and qualifies existing insights on security design. A rich literature argues that tranching creates debt-like instruments that are robust to adverse selection or discourage wasteful information acquisition. Yet, for a given information structure, while tranching confines and...

Derivatives activity, motivated by risk-sharing, can breed risk taking. Bad news about the risk of the asset underlying the derivative increases the expected liability of a protection seller and undermines her risk prevention incentives. This limits risk-sharing, and may create endogenous...

We study a nonexclusive insurance market with adverse selection in which insurers compete through simple contract offers. Multiple contracting endogenously emerges in equilibrium. Different layers of coverage are priced fairly according to the types of insurees who purchase them, giving rise to...