This Paper provides a sufficient condition for the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in monotone pure strategies, in games of incomplete information. First, we show that if each player's incremental ex post pay-off is uniformly increasing in its own action and type, and its type is...

We study the incentives of parents to invest in their children when these investments improve their marriage prospects, in a frictionless marriage market with non-transferable utility. Stochastic returns to investment eliminate the multiplicity of equilibria that plagues models with...

We analyze a standard environment of adverse selection in credit markets. In our environment, entrepreneurs who are privately informed about the quality of their projects need to borrow in order to invest. Conventional wisdom says that, in this class of economies, the competitive equilibrium is...

A 'folk theorem' originating, among others, in the work of Stiglitz maintains that competitive equilibria are always or 'generically' inefficient (unless contracts directly specify consumption levels as in Prescott and Townsend, thus bypassing trading in anonymous markets). This paper critically...

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...

The paper explains how a country can fall into a 'low-skill, bad-job trap', in which workers acquire insufficient training and firms provide insufficient skilled vacancies. In particular, the paper argues that in countries where a large proportion of the workforce is unskilled, firms have little...

We revisit the question of the efficiency of individual decisions to be protected against crime for the cases of both observable and unobservable protection. We obtain that observable protection is unambiguously associated with a negative externality and that at the individual level, it has a...

When today’s actions can affect tomorrow's value of an asset and when the principal does not have access to hard information, either about productive activity or monitoring activity, two incentive problems must be simultaneously solved: first, the ‘ex-ante’ moral hazard problem of inducing...

Directed search models are market games in which each firm announces a wage commitment to attract a worker. Miscoordination among workers generates search frictions, yet in equilibrium more productive firms post more attractive wage commitments to fill their vacancies faster, which yields...

In the basic adverse selection model, a seller makes a contract offer to a privately informed buyer. A fundamental hypothesis of incentive theory is that the seller may want to offer a menu of contracts to separate the buyer types. In the good state of nature, total surplus is not different from...