The fact that according to the celebrated Coase Theorem rational parties always try to exploit all gains from trade is usually taken as an argument against the necessity of government intervention through Pigouvian taxation in order to correct externalities. However, we show that the hold-up...

We consider second-price and first-price auctions in the symmetric independent private values framework. We modify the standard model by the assumption that the bidders have reference-based utility, where a publicly announced reserve price has some influence on the reference point. It turns out...

We study an adverse selection problem in which information that is imperfectly correlated with the agent's type becomes public ex post. Unbounded penalties are ruled out by assuming that the agent is wealth constrained. The following conclusions emerge. If the agent's utility is increasing in...

Consider an employer who wants her employee to work hard. As is well known from the efficiency wage literature, the employer must pay the (wealth-constrained) employee a positive rent to provide incentives for exerting unobservable effort. Alternatively, the employer could make effort observable...

Recent work in the field of mechanism design has led some researchers to propose institutional changes that would permit parties to enter into nonmodifiable contracts, which is not possible under current contract law. This paper demonstrates that it may well be socially desirable not to enforce...

This paper discusses the optimal organization of sequential agency problems with contractible control actions under limited liability. In each of two stages, a risk-neutral agent can choose an unobservable effort level. A success in the first stage makes effort in the second stage more...