Due to technological progress, recent performance is often more informative about future performance prospects than is older performance. We incorporate information decay in a career concern model in which performance depends on type and effort and contract renewal is based on the performance...

We derive a theoretical model of effort in the presence of career concern based on the multi-unit all-pay auction, and closely inspired by the Italian academic market. In this model, the number of applicants, the number of new posts, and the relative importance of the determinants of promotion...

The procurement of an innovation involves motivating a research effort to generate a new idea and then implementing that idea efficiently. If research efforts are unverifiable and implementation costs are private information, a trade-off arises between the two objectives. The optimal mechanism...

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent games of incomplete information. In this context, we identify a class of direct and incentive compatible mechanisms: each principal privately recommends to each agent to reveal her private information to the other principals, and each agent behaves...

We study competing-mechanism games under exclusive competition: principals first simultaneously post mechanisms, then agents simultaneously choose to participate and communicate with at most one principal. In this setting, which is common to competing-auction and competitive-search applications,...

We show that in an infinitely repeated Cournot game when firms adopt stick and carrot strategies exogenous horizontal mergers are profitable regardless the size of the merged entity. We characterize an equilibrium in which the new entity maximizes its discounted intertemporal profit under the...

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent models of moral hazard: Principals compete through mechanisms in the presence of agents who take unobservable actions. In this context, we provide a rationale for restricting principals to make use of simple mechanisms, which correspond to direct...

There may be a nexus between card games and financial markets. Akerlof and Shiller (2010) ask whether the decline in the number of bridge players and the growth in the number of poker players may have led to the current bad financial traders' practices which are responsible for the global...

Natural disasters have been shown to produce effects on social capital, risk and time preferences of victims. We run experiments on altruistic, time and risk preferences on a sample of Sri Lankan microfinance borrowers affected/unaffected by the tsunami shock in 2004 at a 7-year distance from...