Performance indicators are increasingly used to regulate quality in health care and other areas of the public sector. We develop a model of contracting between a purchaser (principal) and a provider (agent) under the following scenarios: a) higher ability increases quality directly and...

The Paper studies a straightforward adverse selection problem in which an informative but imperfect signal on the agent’s type becomes public ex post. The agent is protected by limited liability, which rules out unboundedly high penalties. Analysing the consequences of the additional...

A finite number of sellers (n) compete in schedules to supply an elastic demand. The costs of the sellers have uncertain common and private value components and there is no exogenous noise in the system. A Bayesian supply function equilibrium is characterized; the equilibrium is privately...

A central insight of agency theory is that when a principal offers a contract to a privately informed agent, the principal trades off ex post efficiency in the bad state of nature against a larger profit in the good state of nature. We report about an experiment with 508 participants designed to...

The lemons model assumes that owners of used cars have an informational advantage over potential buyers with respect to the quality of their vehicles. Owners of bad cars will try to sell them to unsuspecting buyers while owners of good cars will hold on to theirs. Consequently, the quality of...

We study interventions to restore efficient lending and investment when financial markets fail because of adverse selection. We solve a design problem where the decision to participate in a program offered by the government can be a signal for private information. We charac terize optimal...

This paper provides an analysis of the health insurance and health care consumption. A structural microeconomic model of joint demand for health insurance and health care is developed and estimated using full maximum likelihood method using Swiss insurance claims data for over 60,000 adult...

Deposit insurance schemes are becoming increasingly popular around the world and yet there is little understanding of how they should be designed and what their consequences are. In this Paper we provide a new rationale for the provision of deposit insurance. We analyse a model in which agents...

The paper studies the impact of government budget constraint in a pure adverse selection problem of monopoly regulation. The government maximizes total surplus but incurs some cost of public funds à la Laffont and Tirole (1993). An alternative to regulation is proposed in which firms are free...

We study the effect of additional private information in an agency model with an endogenous information structure. If more private information becomes available to the agent, this may hurt the agent, benefit the principal, and affect the total surplus ambiguously.