This paper presents a cheap-talk one-sender-multiple-receiver model in which audiences freeride on each other in the context of global environmental protections. The sender observes the magnitude of damage of emission, and sends the same message simultaneously to all audiences, who then play a...

We analyze how uncertainty regarding future climate conditions affects the design of concession contracts, organizational forms and technological choices in a principal-agent context with dynamic moral hazard, limited liability and irreversibility constraints. The prospect of future, uncertain...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

This paper explores a new role for venture capitalists, as knowledge intermediaries. A venture capital investor can communicate valuable knowledge to an entrepreneur, facilitating innovation. The venture capitalist can also communicate the entrepreneur's innovative knowledge to other portfolio...

This paper discusses some connections among several robustness concepts of mechanisms in terms of agents' behaviors. Specifically, under certain conditions such as private values and ``rich'' interdependent values, we show that implementation in (one-round or iterative) undominated strategies, a...

We study the mechanism-design problem of guaranteeing desirable performances whenever agents are rational in the sense of not playing weakly dominated strategies. We first provide an upper bound for the best performance we can guarantee among all feasible mechanisms. We then prove the bound to...

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...

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...

Innovative start-ups and venture capitalists are highly clustered: Silicon Valley is probably the best-known example. Clusters differ in the contracts they use, and in how they perform. I explore the link between spillovers, contractual design and performance. I find that more "incomplete"...

We study competition between an incumbent Credit Rating Agency (CRA) and a sequence of entrant CRAs that are potentially more e¤ective but whose ability in appraising default risk is unproven when they enter the market. We show that free entry competition fails to select the most competent CRA...