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...

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...

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 investigates various options for the organization of the railway industry when network operators require the access to multiple national networks to provide international (freight or passenger) transport services. The EU rail system provides a framework for our analysis....

In this paper, we discuss the choice for build-operate-and-transfer (BOT) concessions when governments and …rm managers do not share the same information regarding the operation characteristics of a facility. We show that larger shadow costs of public funds and larger information asymmetries...

The aim of this paper is to highlight empirically some important worldwide differences in the impact of privatization of the fixed-line telecommunications operator on network expansion, tariffs, and efficiency during the 1985-2007 period for a large panel of countries. Our work suggests that the...

Motivated by recent policy events experienced by the European natural gas industry, this paper develops a simple model for analyzing the interaction between gas release and capacity investment programs as tools to improve the performance of imperfectly competitive markets. We consider a regional...