In a dynamic game between N retailers and a large number of suppliers, I show that inefficient contracting emerges as a mechanism to implement collusion among retailers, building on the natural ‘complementarity’ between retail and wholesale prices. When efficient collusion is not...

In this short paper we study a competing vertical hierarchies model where the allocation of residual claimancy is endogenous and is determined jointly with production and contractual decisions. We find a set of circumstances in which the (equilibrium) allocation of residual claimancy is affected...

We study the problem of a Legislator designing immunity for privately informed cooperating accomplices. Our objective is to highlight the positive (vertical) externality between expected returns from crime and the information rent that must be granted by the Legislator to whistleblowers in order...

We study the effects of information sharing on optimal contracting in a vertical hierarchies model with moral hazard and effort externalities. The paper has three main objectives. First, we determine and compare the equilibrium contracts with and without communication. We identify how each...

Since 1991 the Italian Legislator grants amnesties, protection and even economic bene.ts to former mobsters cooperating with the justice. These incentives were intro- duced to break down omertà. What is the economic logic behind this policy? Did the program succeed? To address these issues we...

We use data from the Italian manufacturing industry to document a positive relation- ship between delegation of decisions within organizations and involvement in research and development. This positive correlation is robust to controlling for the determi- nants of R&D within firms such as the...

Multiple bank lending creates an incentive to overborrow and default. When creditor rights are poorly protected and collateral value is volatile, this incentive leads to rationing and non-competitive interest rates. If banks share information about past debts via credit reporting systems, the...

The paper examines the equilibrium relationship between managerial incentives and product market competition in imperfectly competitive industries. In a simple managerial economy, where owners simultaneously choose reward schemes and managers are privately informed on firms. production...

We study a general equilibrium model where agents’ preferences, productivity and labor endowments depend on their health status, and occupational choices affect individual health distributions. Efficiency typically requires agents of the same type to obtain different expected utilities if...

We study a specific model of competing manufacturer-retailer pairs where adverse selection and moral hazard are coupled with non-market externalities at the downstream level. In this simple framework we show that a “laissez- faire" approach towards vertical price control might harm consumers...